


The Lady or The Doctor

by seashadows



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Big Bang Challenge, F/M, Het and Slash, M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 11:53:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seashadows/pseuds/seashadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The love story of Nyota Uhura and Leonard McCoy. </p>
<p>(Star Trek Big Bang, 2010. The master post can be found <a href="http://seashadows.livejournal.com/8797.html">here</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Beginning

She supposed it had begun just after Nero was defeated – the decline. Spock had been…well, not _distant_ since then, but quieter. Not calm, per se, but contemplative nevertheless, like he was pondering whether or not to make a change in his life. Nyota knew that look, for she’d worn it for months before she decided to join Starfleet.   
  
It hadn’t come as a surprise when he approached her, almost shyly, to say what needed to be said - _I do not wish for either of us to remain within a stagnant relationship_ \- and he hadn’t been surprised when she’d agreed. _Dif-tor heh smusma, Spock_ , she’d said when they parted, giving him the phrase in his own language.   
  
She had loved him, and he her. But love could change; her own mother had married twice, Nyota’s father being her second husband. _Love is really more flexible than rigid,_ her father had told her when she’d asked, as a little girl, why there were holopics of another man on the windowsill. _It bends and changes. It doesn’t break._ Nyota had climbed on his lap, eager to hear the sound of his voice again (he worked long hours), and he had obligingly sung to her in Andorian, Afrikaans, and Vulcan, as well as their native Kiswahili.   
  
Not that Nyota’s heart didn’t still twinge a little to see Spock on the bridge, months later, but at least he and she were still _friends_ , if that was an accurate definition for what they were. _Comrades?_ Partners, maybe? They were no longer intimate, but she would still sing for him on occasion, and he would play the Vulcan lyre for only her. They still harmonized, only…not together, not in the way they used to.   
  
These thoughts claimed her attention sometimes when she left the bridge after alpha shift, as they did today. That explained why she didn’t see the man in the corridor before they ran into each other.   
  
“ _Ow!_ Fuck!”   
  
Nyota jumped back, rubbing her forehead; her field of vision throbbed and blurred. “Oh – I’m sorry…are you all right?”   
  
“Peachy,” Doctor McCoy muttered, one hand pressed against his nose. “It’s not bleedin’, at least. What about you?” He stepped closer and peered at her; strangely enough, it seemed like he was actually _concerned_. “You took a knock on the head, Lieutenant Uhura.”   
  
“I’m fine. Really,” she said, although strictly speaking, she wasn’t sure if that was the truth. The contact with McCoy’s head had left her with what already promised to be a splitting headache. “I’m fairly hard-headed, so you don’t need to worry.”   
  
“Yeah, how ‘bout lettin’ me make that call?” He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t seem to be particularly grumpy, all things considered – strange, really, when one took into account how grumpy he was most of the time. _Señor CMO Grumpyboxers_ , as Kirk called him (when he wasn’t calling him ‘Bones’), was fitting, however much Nyota wouldn’t acknowledge that the man was right about something. “Hold still a minute. I just want to look.”   
  
Nyota couldn’t help the ‘will you still respect me in the morning?’ joke that popped into her head at _that_ , but she did manage to keep it to herself. Instead, she sighed a little and stood still while McCoy looked into her face and ran his ever-present tricorder over her. It wasn’t as though he cared about who was looking at them in the crowded hallway – no, not at all.   
  
“Well, you don’t have a concussion,” he finally said, giving the tricorder a final wave, as though for good measure. “Thankfully.”   
  
“I didn’t think I did.” She _did_ think McCoy was a bit neurotic about injuries and such, but after what they’d all been through with Nero, it was understandable. “Thank you for your concern, anyway.”   
  
“Anytime.”   
  
Nyota could tell what he was going to say next long before he said it. She’d heard the same speech from Christine, Pavel, Hikaru, Gaila, and even Kirk (smirking all the while as he did so, of course, because he was _Kirk_.) He shifted a little and rubbed the back of his neck, obviously extremely uncomfortable, then spoke again. “Lieutenant, you and the hob - _Spock_ , I mean, I’ve heard about that. I’m trained in psychology, and as your CMO, if you ever need to discuss it, it’s my duty to make sure –“   
  
“It’s fine, Doctor,” Nyota interrupted, for which he seemed more than a little relieved. “Our breakup was mutual and amicable” – and his vocabulary had rubbed off on her, too, it seemed – “and I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think I’m going to need it.”   
  
“All right. Good.” McCoy’s flushed cheeks lightened just a bit. “Don’t suppose the pointy-eared computer is going to want to talk to me about it, either? Emotions are illogical and all that.”   
  
Nyota shrugged. “I don’t keep track of his appointments.” To be honest, she never had. Spock was his own person, separate from her, and she hadn’t thought it fair to him, or logical, to watch his whereabouts every moment of the day. He had been committed to her, and that was all the reassurance she’d needed. “To be honest, though, it would surprise me if he did.”   
  
“Hhnh, yeah. I’d bet anything you’re right about that.” He turned to go, then added, almost as an afterthought, “Come by sickbay if you start feelin’ any pain or dizziness, or if your forehead starts swellin’.”   
  
“All right.” Something occurred to Nyota, then, and she called after him before she could stop herself. “Doctor McCoy?”   
  
He turned around. “Yeah?”   
  
“Why do you call him a hobgoblin, anyway? I should think you would give _Romulans_ that nickname, not a Vulcan.” From what she knew of North American fairy tales, hobgoblins were tricksters, travelers’ enemies. McCoy had repeated the name just the day before, when Spock refused to leave his shift to be immunized against Melvaran mud fleas.   
  
“Hobgoblin?” A look of confusion momentarily flashed across McCoy’s face in a few blinks and a purse of his full mouth. “No, no, I don’t mean I think he’s _evil_ ,” he said slowly after a pause. “Hobgoblins are just annoying, but they’re harmless. It’s _goblins_ who’re the evil ones.”   
  
“Thank you _very_ much for the clarification.”   
  
If McCoy caught the hint of amusement – or was it sarcasm? – in her voice, he didn’t show it. “Yeah, well. Anytime. Y’know,” he added, with a slight quirk of his mouth, “in some other stupid universe, this could be the start to one of those old films – man bangs into woman in the hallway, they’re datin’ a month later, and shackled together for life a month after that.”   
  
“That’s not going to happen,” she said with a rather derisive snort – derisive towards the idea, of course, rather than him. He did seem to get it, though, because he just returned the sound and lifted a hand before walking away.   
  
Nyota watched him go. In fact, she watched him so intently that she had to make herself tear her eyes away from the clean lines of his back as he walked. _Steady, Nyota, your last partner was his polar opposite,_ she told herself sternly. And at any rate, she didn’t much care for McCoy beyond feelings of friendship and annoyance at his abrasiveness. Superficial attraction was just that – mild attraction based on physical attributes. Nothing more.   
  
His association with Kirk made him a most illogical choice for a partner, too, as Spock might well say. She still rather disliked the captain, and a confidant of his was likely none of hers. 

~

  
Nyota wasn’t a particularly regular visitor to sickbay – at least, not in comparison to, for example, Kirk. _He_ was in there after every away mission, it seemed, and that was hardly his fault (as she’d conceded after seeing his behavior there, more noble than she would have expected). She did go once a month for a birth-control hypospray; on a busy starship, having her period would be inconvenient and even dangerous if it affected her normally neutral mood. And, as her mother always said, being _too_ careful never hurt anyone.   
  
Of course, she had been referring to _not_ jumping off the roof after one of her brothers did, an act that earned Nyota a broken leg and eternal teasing from Adili and Ekevu, but she thought the sentiment could be applied here.   
  
It was a surprise, when she walked into sickbay, to see Spock there _He_ was injured on occasion, yes, but not nearly to the extent that Kirk was. It _wasn’t_ a surprise to see McCoy by his side, berating him in an irritated tone of voice, as he was wont to do. “You pointy-eared hobgoblin, what the hell were you thinkin’, trying to fix some other department’s problems?” He jabbed a hypospray into Spock’s neck.   
  
“I had calculated the probability of an explosion at four point nine seven percent,” Spock replied. One eye was swollen, already bruising, and the same side of his face was lacerated, with a particularly nasty scrape on the cheekbone. Even through her concern, Nyota couldn’t help but shake her head. _She_ was of the opinion that he had an unrealistic perception of his ability to fix things. If he admitted it at all, Spock would probably classify it as a relic of his human ancestry. He’d probably been down in Engineering again, trying to deal with a problem that Scotty could handle on his own.   
  
“Probabilities, my _ass_ ,” McCoy muttered as he ran a dermal regenerator over Spock’s face, apparently having come to the same conclusion as Nyota had. “Probably just wanted to prove your big Vulcan brain’s better than a capable engineer’s.”   
  
Spock didn’t say anything – probably because he knew protesting was futile at this point. Even if McCoy did call him a… _oh_. Nyota couldn’t quite repress a smile. _Annoying, but not dangerous._ Strange, to think that she shared a private joke with someone as prickly as Doctor McCoy, but stranger things had happened before.   
  
“All right, you’re done. Now get outta here… _hobgoblin_.” The last part of this sentence was said under McCoy’s breath as Spock left. Nyota could see Spock’s shoulders twitch in irritation (his hearing was exceptionally good, something the doctor probably knew), but she didn’t have time to watch him before McCoy saw her. “Lieutenant Uhura?”   
  
“Yes, hi.” In her experience, talking quickly tended to remove the possibility of an awkward silence, especially when the subject pertained to something like birth control. “Is Nurse Chapel in?” She usually called the woman _Christine_ , but something told her that requesting _Nurse Chapel_ would remove any implications of a personal visit.   
  
McCoy shook his head. “She’s off-shift. Can I help you?”   
  
Nyota paused for a moment, but only one – McCoy was a doctor, after all, and surely wouldn’t flinch at this. “I’m here for an Ortholexin hypospray,” she explained. “It’s monthly, and Nurse Chapel usually administers it, but since you’re here…”   
  
McCoy nodded, neatly cutting her off. “Not a problem, Lieutenant. Let me just pull up your records and then I can do it.” He tapped something in on his PADD, scrolled down some list or other, and then looked up again, frowning. “When was your last physical?”   
  
“About…” Hm. Come to think of it, she couldn’t quite remember how long it had been, which would’ve have been strange otherwise, but life on the Enterprise kept everyone busy. “A year, maybe?” Yes, about that. It had been at the Academy. “Why?”   
  
“You’re overdue for one, and a couple of boosters,” he said, a frown-wrinkle still apparent between his eyes, and Nyota inwardly groaned. _Damn_. She wasn’t afraid of hyposprays, exactly, but she’d never been on the receiving end of one of McCoy’s before. From what she knew, he was brutal about it. “I don’t know why you weren’t sent a memo. You’re not on duty, I’m assumin’?”   
  
“No. I just got off-shift.” If she had to be examined, well, this was as good a time as any to get it out of the way. At least McCoy wouldn’t call _her_ a hobgoblin – not a ‘green-blooded’ one, anyway. “Are you going to do it?”   
  
“Yeah. M’Benga’s off-shift, too.” McCoy went to a nearby cupboard and brought back a folded sickbay gown, handing it to her. “Hop up on a biobed and put that on. You can draw the privacy curtain if you want, and keep your – undergarments on. I’m gonna get your stuff ready.”   
  
_At least he’s professional about it,_ Nyota mused as she stripped out of her uniform and put the gown on, having taken McCoy’s advice and drawn the privacy curtain (if there was one thing that stayed the same, even in space, it was the inadequacy of hospital gowns). Christine Chapel was her friend, so an exam with her would be awkward, too.   
  
McCoy drew the curtain aside, his hands full of hyposprays – all right, maybe it was just her imagination that he held about five million of the things – and a few other medical supplies that she didn’t recognize. “All right, let’s get started,” he said, and moved to stand in front of the biobed. “You’re feelin’ all right today? No suspicious aches, swelling, rashes, or other symptoms?”   
  
“No, I’m fine.”   
  
“Good. Hold your head still. I’m examining your eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.” Nyota obediently kept still while he shone a penlight into the aforementioned areas. “Everything’s clear,” he muttered, probably to himself, and scribbled something on his PADD. “Have you ever had Cardassian conjunctivitis? It can affect scans.”   
  
“I haven’t,” Nyota said, and was surprised to feel a twinge of – well, _surprise_ at his professionalism and knowledge. _Not that it should’ve been otherwise_ , she rebuked herself. _He’s a_ doctor _, not just Kirk’s friend._ Even if it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, like when Kirk slung his arm over ‘Bones’s” shoulder in the mess hall and laughed loudly enough to be heard a sector over.   
  
“Didn’t think so. Just a second, now.” He ran the tricorder over her, and glanced at it before looking back up at her. “You’re about one point seven two meters tall, and weigh fifty-two kilograms. What are your meals like?”   
  
“Why?” She didn’t _think_ there was anything wrong with her eating habits, but one never knew.   
  
“It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’re just underweight for a woman of your age and height. Do you take nutritional supplements?”   
  
“Yes. I’ve taken them for years, and I make sure to eat a balanced diet.” Nyota couldn’t exactly help being thin. She’d danced a lot when she was younger, and both of her parents were lean, too; her mother wasn’t all that curvy, even after bearing Nyota and her brothers.   
  
“That’s good. Make sure to take extra iron and Vitamin D if you start feeling fatigued. There’s no sunlight on this tin can.” McCoy shook his head. “Space is a case of rickets wrapped in darkness and silence.”   
  
“I’m well aware of that,” Nyota said dryly, raising an eyebrow. “The nearest sunlight is a solar system away.”   
  
“That’s right. Turn your head to the side, Lieutenant.” Firm fingers touched the side of her neck when she did so, then pressed under her chin. “Your lymph nodes are fine. Haven’t been sick in a while, I imagine.”   
  
“It’s been at least a year,” she answered.   
  
“Hope it stays that way,” McCoy said, and held up the tricorder. “I need to listen to your heart and lungs now. Would you prefer I do that over top of the gown, or under it?” His cheeks and ears were faintly pink, something that surprised Nyota; she hadn’t thought he had any sensibilities, before this.   
  
“You can go under it,” she said, and resisted the urge to laugh at the innuendo. “Doesn’t that give a better result?”   
  
“It does, but there’re some species that don’t take kindly to you touchin’ their bare skin. Glad to know you’re not one of them,” he told her. A corner of his mouth curled up in a slight smile, even as he slid a hand under her gown, cool and solid – had she grown so used to Spock’s heat? - against her upper back. The other hand, the one holding the tricorder, came to rest against her sternum. “Take in a deep breath, and hold it.”   
  
Nyota obeyed. Her heartbeat, amplified by the tricorder, was as loud as an awkward silence between them. “All right. That’s good,” he said, and moved the tricorder to a spot on her abdomen. “Another breath…good, now one more.”   
  
“Is everything all right?” she asked, after he’d – thankfully – removed the tricorder and his hands.   
  
“Just fine.” McCoy wrote something else down. “Your heartbeat’s a little fast…and so’s your blood pressure,” he added, glancing at his tricorder with a look on his face that bespoke irritation (his usual expression, really). “Has Jim been bickerin’ with you on the bridge?”   
  
“No, it’s not that. I’m just…a little nervous,” Nyota confessed, and rubbed the back of her neck with one palm, a gesture she hadn’t outgrown. “I saw the same physician all through the Academy, and you’re new to me. I should think that’s normal.”   
  
“Huh. I’ll have to see if that’s happened before.” Clearly, he didn’t quite believe her explanation, and rightly so; she wasn’t _quite_ telling the truth. It wasn’t that she had high blood pressure, but there was something more than _simple_ anxiety coloring her pulse. “Go on and put your arms over your head.”  
  
“What are you doing now?” Nyota asked, even as she obeyed. She’d grown rather used to him telling her what he was going to do beforehand.   
  
“Considerin’ that you’re a little stressed, I won’t do a pelvic exam today,” he said. “I still need to check your lower lymph nodes and perform a breast exam, though.” He never hesitated over the word ‘breast’, she was pleased to notice. If he didn’t exist independent of his libido, at least he seemed to make a conscious effort to control it, or the knee-jerk reactions that went along with being a human male.   
  
“You don’t need me to take this off, I shouldn’t think.”   
  
“No. Just stay still while I perform the exam.” McCoy placed his hands on either side of her rib cage, just under her armpits, and gently pressed up. “No swelling. Lieutenant…” He looked her full in the face then, as though about to ask her permission to do something life-changing. “I’ll need to perform the whole thing manually to get the best results. If you’d prefer I didn’t, I can change the settings on the tricorder.”   
  
Nyota shook her head. As awkward as it was for him to touch her breasts, even through the material of the gown, she would rather not mess up what he was doing. “A manual exam is fine.”   
  
“All right. This’ll only take a second,” he said, and laid his fingers at the edge of one breast, pressing against it as he had done under her arm. _Completely, utterly professional,_ , the thought ran through her head. Had she been expecting him to act like Kirk when confronted with a pair of breasts? After his…well, _gentlemanly_ behavior during the rest of the physical, apparently a friend of Kirk didn’t mean a pervert of the lowest order.   
  
_Enough, Nyota,_ she thought, shaking her head. _You’ve heard him say it five thousand times and you_ still _can’t remember he’s a doctor?_   
  
Cool fingers continued to press down – cool through the material, compared to other fingers - checking in a circle around one breast before moving on to the other. “You seem fine, so far,” he remarked. “Feel all right?”   
  
“Yes.” Nyota closed her eyes and made a concerted effort to breathe normally. This was…well, if not surreal, then certainly _abnormal_. Like something out of one of those dreams that, when she woke up, she wasn’t sure whether she liked or disliked. Not a sex dream, no, but one of those that was more like floating above some landscape she didn’t recognize.   
  
“Lieutenant?”   
  
“Hm?” Her eyes snapped open to meet McCoy’s, punctuated by his usual raised eyebrow.   
  
“You’re finished. You can put your arms down now.” He straightened up and pushed the privacy curtain aside, stepping out before closing it again. “Go on and change.”   
  
“Oh. Thank you.” What did she want to _do_ with her arms, anyway? Rest them in her lap, or was that too provocative? Let them dangle on the biobed? That was unprofessional. She didn’t really know why she _cared_ , but for some reason, she did. “Is there anything else you need to do?” she asked as she changed into her uniform, faster than she would have done had she been alone. “Come back in. I’m finished,” she added.   
  
“Just need to ask a few questions before I give you your hyposprays,” McCoy said after re-entering the space, and picked up his PADD again. “You’ve been takin’ Ortholexin for…eighteen months?”  
  
“A year and a half, yes.”   
  
“Were your periods regular before that?”   
  
“Yes. Every four to five weeks.” And they’d been _heavy_ , a nuisance her mother said had come from her side of the family.   
  
“Just one more question, Lieutenant.” She could tell this wasn’t going to be fun; studying body language and verbal cues had made her proficient, and McCoy’s ‘Lieutenant’ usually preceded a personal or awkward question of some sort. “I do have to ask this. Are you currently sexually active?” His eyes flicked downward, focusing on the PADD; she had the feeling it was to avoid her eyes, or to hide the blush that she could see coloring his ears. _Round_ ears – and again, that feeling of displacement.   
  
Oh, now _there_ was the sixty-four-thousand-credit question. Nyota felt her cheeks go hot. “Not for about two months.”   
  
“I figured.” His blush deepened, and she could tell he was backtracking when he quickly added, “Not that I thought you weren’t – it’s just I heard about you and Spock.”   
  
“I know.”   
  
“Ah.” The silence between them was fairly uncomfortable. Nyota looked at her knees, so as to avoid looking at McCoy’s face. She wasn’t quite sure which was more embarrassing: the fact that McCoy knew she _wasn’t_ having sex nowadays, or the fact that he thought he had to be polite about it.   
  
No, it was a toss-up, really.   
  
McCoy broke the silence, as usual, by brandishing a hypospray. “This one’s the Ortholexin,” he said, “and you have another two comin’ that are comprehensive vaccine boosters.”   
  
Given how the doctor liked (or seemed to like) jabbing hyposprays hard into Kirk’s neck, Nyota was almost tempted to ask if it was going to hurt, but she ultimately decided it was probably a bad idea. Kirk deserved it most of the time, anyway, and she doubted McCoy was that cruel with everyone else. If he was, he’d have been out of a job by now, friend of the captain or not.   
  
As it turned out, she was right. He set the hypospray against her neck and injected the medication, lightly enough that she barely felt it. Had it gone in, or was he just practicing for the real thing? “Did you do it?”   
  
“Yeah. Now hold still. I gotta get the other ones, and I don’t want to get you in the face by accident.”   
  
“Is that even possible?” Nyota asked, and raised her eyebrow again (she seemed to do that quite a bit around McCoy), but did hold still. Undoubtedly, if she lost an eye or got ‘sprayed in the cheek by accident, she would be subjected to a good many accented rants concerning “goddamn moving idiots” or something like that.   
  
Wait, since when did she notice his _accent?_ Usually, it was hidden under a layer of snark.   
  
“All right, you’re done.” McCoy set aside the empty hyposprays. “Good thing you came in today, or I would’ve had to send you a message pretty soon about getting your physical.”   
  
Clearly, Nyota had been on Jim Kirk’s ship too long; it was the only explanation for a porn setup flashing through her mind when McCoy said ‘getting your physical.’ She could just see it now: her in some gown designed to pop open at the slightest touch, holding a hypospray that was really a dildo, giving some unidentifiable dark-haired man a physical, and…  
  
…and clearly, she was overdue for some quality time with her hands if that was what ran through her mind in _sickbay_. Nyota cleared her throat and smiled at McCoy with what she hoped was an _I wasn’t just thinking about horrible porn holovids in here_ expression. “Thank you.”   
  
He half-shrugged, self-deprecatingly. “No reason to. It’s just a routine checkup.” Nyota opened her mouth, ready to reply to the contrary, then closed it again. “What?”   
  
“Never mind.” She’d thought better of saying ‘you did a good job’, as if her status as a bridge officer nullified his higher rank and seven years’ age difference. The last thing she wanted was to inadvertently insult him; McCoy seemed like the sort of person who’d take that the wrong way. “So I’ll see you in another month?”   
  
“Yeah. I’ll make sure to set it up so Christine’s on shift, if you want.”   
  
“I – I don’t mind, either way.” Did he dislike her so much that giving her a hypospray seemed distasteful to him? Nyota forced her answering shrug to look nonchalant. “It’s just a dose of medication. I don’t think it really matters who presses the hypo into my neck.”   
  
Surprisingly, the smile on McCoy’s face was genuine, if amused. “Well, all _right_ , then. I won’t set it up and you’ll just get hypo’d by whoever’s in here.”   
  
Spock would have said ‘Indeed’ and quirked an eyebrow to incite McCoy to snarl at him, but that was one leaf Nyota didn’t plan to take out of his book. Instead, she returned the smile and quipped “I look forward to it,” before turning to leave.


	2. The Knight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyota plays a game of chess, figures out a way to help her new friend, and does some thinking.

There was spicy chicken soup in the mess hall today, and Nyota was pleased. She’d developed a taste for the dish, apparently a Starfleet specialty, at the Academy – she would take a bowl of it back to her room some days and study. Provided, of course, that Gaila wasn’t in there with some student or another, having wild sex on the bed (or on the floor, or in the shower; yes, it had happened. Sulu still politely avoided her gaze when they spoke).  
  
She clicked open a newly-published novel on her PADD – apparently, it involved a Denobulan who came to Starfleet, and Nyota was eager to see how accurate it was in terms of cultural references – and brought a spoonful of soup to her mouth. “Mmm,” she murmured, and smiled, eyes closing in delight.  
  
“Greetings, Nyota.” Spock’s voice interrupted the combination of chili-powder chicken broth and the opening lines of Fellia’s Journey. “May I join you?”  
  
Nyota looked up, smiled, and swallowed her soup – not necessarily in that order, as evidenced by the coughing fit that began when she accidentally inhaled some of the hot liquid. “Yes, you may,” she managed, after she’d stopped hacking up what felt like half of her left lung (during which Spock only raised an eyebrow). “Is something wrong?”  
  
“Nothing is wrong.” Spock neatly slid into the seat across from her. “I simply wished to make an inquiry of you.”  
  
“What is it?” Nyota asked, curious. He rarely requested anything – rarely _had_ , even when they were still in a relationship. “Do you want something translated?”  
  
“I do not.” Spock’s face was unreadable, which was unusual; Nyota was always able to make out at least some semblance of an expression, or an emotion, behind his stoic veneer. “I wished to inquire if you would accept my demonstrating a song for the captain.”  
  
“On the Vulcan lyre?” Now it was Nyota’s turn to raise an eyebrow.  
  
“Indeed.”  
  
“For _Kirk?_ Why?” All right, so she knew she was being unfair, but she just couldn’t see _James T. Kirk_ holding any sort of appreciation for anything other than his own pleasure. Still, he hadn’t hit on her, even playfully, in a good few weeks; she’d chalked it up to boredom, but maybe he was maturing or something. “I mean, you don’t have to ask, but...why?”  
  
“He and I have played chess together three times in the past two point seven six weeks,” Spock answered. “During the second game, he began… _humming_ a certain common song while pondering a move.”  
  
“’Common’ as in…?” There were several meanings, and knowing Kirk, she wouldn’t put it past him to hum the kind of ‘common’ song that meant nothing good.  
  
“Well-known.”  
  
“All right.” Nyota set her spoon down. This was getting interesting, and she didn’t want to risk choking again, not in front of Spock. “What happened after that?”  
  
“I told him that I knew of the song. He then requested that I play it in a future encounter.”  
  
“He requested it? Or was it a command?”  
  
“It was a request, Nyota.” Spock blinked at her. “To respond to a previous statement, do humans not experience possessiveness? You and I were romantically involved for six point five months, and I have not played the Vulcan lyre for anyone but you since then. It was logical to ask your permission.”  
  
That did make sense, and honestly, Nyota probably _would_ have felt a little possessive if she’d just heard about him playing the lyre for Kirk without asking her opinion. “Thank you for asking me, Spock,” she said, smiling. “You have my permission to play for him.”  
  
“Thank you, Nyota.” He paused, then went on. “Have you experienced any interesting phenomena since we last spoke?”  
  
She couldn’t help but laugh a little. Spock never would get the hang of human ‘small talk’, and that was one of the things she loved about him. “Not much. I translated that hail from the Rigelian outpost group, but you already know about that, and…hm. I did go to sickbay for my monthly hypo and end up getting a physical from McCoy.” Spock was the one man with whom she didn’t mind talking about that hypo. Well, except maybe McCoy, now, given that he’d administered it.  
  
Spock raised an eyebrow in his ‘that is fascinating’ expression. “A physical examination?”  
  
“Yes. I was overdue for one.”  
  
“I assume that the doctor comported himself professionally,” he said, “or you would not have mentioned the incident in a casual tone.”  
  
“Yes, he did, so don’t worry about it.” Nyota had to restrain herself from touching his hand in reassurance; only a few months ago, the bounds of their relationship would have allowed it, and habits were hard to break. “I was surprised at his professionalism.”  
  
“Were you surprised because of his intimate relationship with the captain?” Spock asked.  
  
Nyota’s mouth opened in surprise. “Wait. They’re _together?_ ” She couldn’t see that happening, even with all the time the two of them spent together, but if Spock had insider information…well, she’d never known him to spread lies before, and doubted he would start now.  
  
“They are close friends, are they not?”  
  
“…yes. They are. Spock, when you said ‘intimate relationship’, I thought you meant that they were in a _romantic_ relationship.”  
  
“The Vulcan equivalent carries no such implications,” Spock answered. Nyota recognized that expression on his face all too well, now: it was his _The Vulcan language is eminently superior to your petty Standard_ look. It drove Kirk nuts, from what she could tell; one slip-up on his part and he sulked for a day.  
  
“I know it doesn’t,” Nyota said, in Vulcan: _fai-tor ri than ish-veh._ Two could play at Spock’s game, and she liked to switch languages in a conversation, even when off-duty. The first time she’d tried it at home, she had been ten, speaking French instead of Kiswahili (and Adili had yowled when he hadn’t understood her, “ _Mother!_ Nyota’s gone crazy!”).  
  
It was amazing how much could be communicated by the movement of a few muscles. Spock’s supercilious expression relaxed, replaced by one slightly raised eyebrow that meant ‘well played.’ “Do you not wish to finish your meal?” he said, and indicated the soup with one hand.  
  
“I consider it rude to talk and eat at the same time.” Still, she picked up the spoon and tested a mouthful – good, it was still hot. “I wish they made a vegetarian version of this. I think you’d really enjoy the flavors.”  
  
“I will attempt to replicate it without animal byproducts,” he answered.  
  
“I think you’ll be successful in that,” Nyota said, and ate another spoonful. Spock was a whiz with a replicator, and she suspected he could easily take one apart in his sleep.  
  
“Perhaps,” Spock said. “I apologize for my abrupt exit, but my father and I arranged a holovid communications channel and he undoubtedly expects my presence.”  
  
Even across species, it seemed, parents were parents. “All right, Spock, go on. _Dif-tor heh smusma._ ” Nyota held up her hand in the _ta’al_ , a gesture she’d learned even before she met Spock; her father’s PhD advisor had studied on Vulcan.  
  
“ _Sochya eh dif_ ,” he returned, and with a neat roundabout turn, left the mess hall.  
  
Nyota finished her soup fairly quickly after that, Fellia’s Journey having failed to live up to her expectations (right away, without much prior study, the Denobulan protagonist was speaking and understanding perfect, idiomatic Standard), and then got up to go to…the recreation room, she decided. It was too soon after her shift to go to her own quarters, and she had nothing better to do at the moment.  
  
She never quite knew, with the mixture of species and cultures aboard the Enterprise, what she’d find when she came to the rec room. Sometimes, she’d find Chekov working on equations (the things that boy thought were fun perplexed her, honestly). Sometimes she saw Vani, who was Rigelian and was fascinated with yarn, knitting. Once, she’d played a memorable all-night game of poker with Christine (which she wouldn’t have done, had the wager not been a stack of Andorian pancakes).  
  
The place was strange. But Nyota _wasn’t_ expecting to see McCoy there. He was seated at a chessboard, staring morosely down at the squares. “ _Doctor?_ ” she asked, and sat down across from him. “Is something wrong?”  
  
He looked up slowly, as if he needed to drag himself out of his own heavy thoughts. “Lieutenant,” he muttered, a worrisome acknowledgement if she’d ever heard one.  
  
 _Leonard_ , she almost called him, then. In the crew rosters, first names popped up more often than not, and she wouldn’t have been able to keep Kirk from eventually finding out ‘Nyota’, even if she wanted to. Being of a higher rank, ‘Leonard Horatio’ came up even more frequently. “Doctor McCoy, did something happen? Are you all right?”  
  
“My personal life’s just bitin’ me in the ass, is all,” McCoy said, and rested his chin in one hand. “You want to play a round?” It took Nyota a moment to realize that he meant chess. “I’m not terrible at it.”  
  
“Oh.” For obvious reasons, she’d never really envisioned him as a chess player, but why not? “All right. Which side do you want to play?”  
  
“Black,” he answered, and picked up a piece from the side at which he was already seated, slowly twirling it between long fingers. “Suits my mood.”  
  
It had been a while since Nyota had played; she took her time in setting up the opening move, a cautious venture of a knight in front of a bishop’s pawn. “Quiet day,” she said, just as cautiously. One never knew what to expect when McCoy’s mood was volatile – it didn’t happen often, but once, he had stormed onto the bridge with a hypospray and stuck Sulu in the neck for missing a vaccination. Hilarious, but scary, and she didn’t care for a repeat in her own neck.  
  
“Yeah.” McCoy pursed his lips and paused, one hand on a pawn. “I don’t like usin’ Starfleet privileges,” he said, and moved the pawn.  
  
Where had _that_ come from? “I don’t think anyone does, really,” Nyota replied – a fairly standard response type, neutral enough. She used the same kind of answer when she dealt with unhappy Tellarites and Admiral Komack on a bad day. She took McCoy’s pawn .  
  
“ _One_ time,” he said, voice low and despondent, and advanced a knight. “ _One_ time, I wanted to see my own kid, and my goddamn ex…” He broke off; when he spoke again, the timbre of his voice was rougher. “Says it won’t happen.”  
  
Nyota looked up in surprise at that, forgetting the chessboard for a moment. “You have a child?” Images flashed through her head: bright hazel eyes set in a tiny, rounder face; shining dark hair on the head of a happy child, twirled in the air by an equally happy father. Not grumpy.  
  
“Yeah. My daughter,” McCoy said. “Her name is Joanna, and she’s turnin’ nine in a couple months. Your move.”  
  
A daughter, then. The mystery child’s hair and eyelashes lengthened in Nyota’s mind. She couldn’t help wondering what Joanna looked like – fine-featured, like her father? Or did she look more like the mother who refused to allow a visit?  
  
She moved a piece almost mechanically. “I’m guessing,” she said, “that your ex-wife won’t let you see her for her birthday.” Why else would he have mentioned her exact age? Something told her that the doctor knew his daughter’s age to the exact hour, maybe even to the minute. Only that kind of love would crease his brow and lower his eyes in pain.  
  
“Bingo. Jim’s perfectly willin’ to have her beamed up for a visit, but Jocelyn’s blockin’ it.”  
  
Now _that_ was surprising. Not the ex-wife’s bullheadedness, but that willingness on Kirk’s part to do something inconvenient for someone else’s sake. “Is that where the Starfleet influence comes in?” she guessed.  
  
“Considerin’ it.” McCoy rubbed his chin before moving his bishop. “Dunno how well it’ll work, even supposin’ I say a few words to someone important. Might not do a damn thing.”  
  
His accent had thickened; the linguist in her couldn’t help but note that, even off-duty. “I’d think that it would help,” Nyota said. Moving _this_ pawn might entice him to take it; she could nab his bishop with her rook if he did. “Does she hold a grudge against Starfleet?” Some did.  
  
McCoy didn’t take the bait. Instead, he positioned another pawn. “It ai – it’s not a question of greasin’ palms. Custody arrangements just said ‘pending further situations’” – his voice deepened and gained a sonorous tone, obviously in imitation of some stern judge or other – “so I only messaged her some at the Academy.” A sigh, perhaps involuntary, escaped his tightly-set mouth. “I couldn’t get any visits then.”  
  
“So what’s the problem? Is CMO not prestigious enough for her?” Nyota knew that her quip was catty, but it was a defense mechanism, not malice, that made her say it. Many a time, she’d been sent home from school as a little girl for verbally lighting into some bully or other. This Jocelyn was hurting McCoy in just the same way.  
  
“She just thinks the Enterprise ain’t a _suitable_ livin’ arrangement for Joanna.” McCoy frowned at the board. “Never mind that she’s as much _my_ kid as Jocelyn’s.” His pawn crept forward, a lone soldier.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Nyota said quietly. She couldn’t take his hand across the board – that would be untoward – so words would have to suffice, insufficient as they were. McCoy was no disgruntled Tellarite, no Denobulan ambassador, no one with a simple problem who waited for a simpler solution. “Is there anything I can do?”  
  
He shook his head and moved the pawn diagonally, taking her knight. “I can’t change the legal system. Guess I lost fair’n square, no matter if my legal counsel was a Caitian. He was good at definitions, but sucked at defense.”  
  
“Ouch.” She wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the captured knight or to McCoy’s custody arrangements; both were setbacks, after all, and the man sitting across from her had no shining armor with which to protect himself. “I assume that there’s nothing Kirk can do, either.”  
  
“She won’t answer his comms.” Strangely enough, that brought a smile to his face. “Just like mornings after his failed dates.”  
  
Nyota couldn’t help laughing. McCoy’s smile was infectious, and the thought of Kirk being sexually frustrated amused her. “Hasn’t it traditionally been the other way around?”  
  
“Not with Jim. You didn’t hear it from me,” he began, leaning forward, “but he’s a little more considerate’n most people think. Likes follow-up calls and holdin’ doors and sendin’ flowers. Shit like that.”  
  
She raised an eyebrow. “I assume that you find ‘shit like that’ unnecessary, Doctor?”  
  
“Nah,” McCoy said, and moved a piece. “I just ain’t impressed by the fact that most of his chivalry’s aimed toward gettin’ him laid. Or it _was_ , before he jumped up the ranks and needed to be responsible.”  
  
 _Jumped up the ranks and needed to be responsible._ She liked that. “If his chivalry was ‘getting him laid’ here, I think he would’ve shouted it all over the bridge by now,” she said, and delicately countered his move.  
  
“Hey, it ain’t like that at all,” she was surprised to hear him say in a surprised tone. “Jim’s not a bragger, Lieutenant. I don’t know who told you that, but they’re just wrong.” His eyes were wide with…shock? Odd.  
  
“Be that as it may, I once walked in on him trying to get it on with my roommate,” Nyota replied dryly. “That’s not exactly conducive to a good opinion of him on my part.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” With a plastic _click_ , McCoy took her pawn. “Not to channel the hobgoblin here, but you’re being illogical.”  
  
Nyota blinked. “Come again?”  
  
“You listened to me bitch about my personal life and thought Jocelyn shouldn’t have judged me. I’m not sayin’ you’re wrong.” He rested his chin on his palm again, looking her right in the eyes – it was a bit disconcerting. “But you’re doin’ the exact same thing to Jim. No benefit of the doubt.”  
  
She’d been about to pick up a chess piece, but her hand now fell in her lap, useless with surprise. Was that right?  
  
It couldn’t be right. Could it?  
  
“I’m not sure if you’re telepathic or the galaxy’s best guesser,” she managed to say after about thirty seconds of awkward silence.  
  
“Hmm.” McCoy made a throaty noise that probably meant either amusement or contemplation, or both. “You’re not the only one who’s been trained in communications.”  
  
“You weren’t on the Operations track…?” Nyota let the question trail off; surely he couldn’t have double-majored, not in two such different disciplines. Not even Spock could have done that.  
  
“No, but I did a psychiatry rotation in med school and another one at the Academy.” Ah, so that explained it. And it explained how he’d hit the nail on the head in terms of her tenuous relationship with Kirk.  
  
Then again, he had one of those himself. “If I’m illogical regarding a bridge officer,” Nyota remarked, “then so are you.”  
  
McCoy, as it turned out, had far fewer compunctions when it came to being polite than she did. “ _What?_ ”  
  
“You hold the same kind of antagonistic viewpoint towards Spock,” Nyota explained, “as you said I do towards Kirk.” Now she was _sure_ she was channeling Spock, or at least his brain; the next words out of her mouth were purely Vulcan. “Finding a fault in me without admitting the same fault in yourself is both hypocritical and illogical.”  
  
“Sure your blood isn’t green?” McCoy said, leaning across the board as though to check her veins, and shrugging. “You have a point. I don’t really hate Spock, though – I just like to yank his chain a little. Y’know how that is.”  
  
“If Spock were here, he’d tell you he doesn’t have a chain and it’s illogical to invent one,” Nyota said, but she grinned as she did. “Just for the record, though, your epithets are getting a little stale. It’s either his blood or his ears. Why not his eyebrows or something?”  
  
McCoy raised an eyebrow of his own, echoing her smile. “Lieutenant Uhura, are you actually suggesting ways for me to piss Spock off?”  
  
“No. I’m just helping you expand the parameters of your imagination.”  
  
“Expand my parameters, my ass,” he snorted, and looked down at the board again. “More like you have a sense of humor I sure as hell didn’t know about. You should tell your ideas to Jim – he’d think they were hilarious.”  
  
“No way am I going to do that,” Nyota said. Kirk the Annoying would probably just giggle and hit on her again. “It’s not worth the risk.”  
  
McCoy set a piece down. “Lieutenant, why do you hate Jim so much?” he asked. “Because he tried to hit on you? Kept tryin’ to get your first name? What?”  
  
“I – huh.” It wasn’t that she could point to _one_ specific incident and say _this is why I dislike James T. Kirk_ , but he gave off a vibe that irritated her. “His attitude. It’s cocky, and he tried to screw my roommate at the Academy.”  
  
“He tried to screw a lot of roommates,” McCoy replied. “Don’t take it personally. And if you spent more time with him, you’d probably realize that he ain’t obnoxious all the time.”  
  
“ _Right_ ,” she said, derisively. “Maybe if he hadn’t kept pressuring me to give him my first name…”  
  
“My question is why didn’t you give it to him in the first place? Fuck’s sake, it was your _name_ , not your federation security number.” She recognized the look on McCoy’s face as one of irritation…surprising, since she’d never expected that to be directed at _her_. “He’s had a hard life. Knowin’ people’s names is like a security blanket for him. Makes him feel like he belongs somewhere.” He looked at her, long and hard, before adding, “Now I don’t want that gettin’ around. Can I trust you won’t tell people?”  
  
“Why did you tell _me_ , if you didn’t want it getting around?” It was a logical question, given that McCoy seemed to have a high enough opinion of his friend to keep his secrets. It was a trait Nyota admired in people.  
  
“’Cause I wanted to get rid of that misguided opinion you got goin’ on that Jim’s just a skank, and I figure you can keep it to yourself.” His mouth quirked in a sardonic smile at the sight of her open mouth. “He’s a good kid when you get to know him. So he’s got a libido. That ain’t a crime.”  
  
“And he knows how to exercise it, that’s for sure,” Nyota couldn’t help but remark.  
  
“ _Look._ ” McCoy slapped a hand down on his thigh and looked her straight in the face. “He doesn’t have to be celibate. Jim likes sex, yeah, but he doesn’t just stick it in anything that moves. If you have a right to get some, so does he.”  
  
“Doesn’t ‘getting some’ involve _two_ people?” she said. “I’m single, so your comparison doesn’t exactly translate.”  
  
“I think you got the gist of it. Check.” He pointed at the board, where a knight threatened Nyota’s king. _Right_ \- they were still playing, weren’t they? Over the course of the conversation, she’d concentrated less on the game.  
  
She moved her king out of the way. “I just don’t know how to change my opinion of him this late in the game, so to speak,” she said. “That night in the bar, which I’m _sure_ he’s told you about, was a pretty strong first impression.”  
  
McCoy glanced at the board and sighed. “Just don’t let one bad encounter control how you act around him. Jocelyn met me in a bar, too, you know.”  
  
“Your ex, from whom you’re now divorced,” Nyota reminded him; it wasn’t really an apt comparison if he was trying to get her to be friends with Kirk.  
  
“The point is,” McCoy said loudly, clearly not amused, “is that one hookup when we were both plastered outta our minds shaped our relationship for _seven years_ ‘fore the divorce. Now we’re millions of miles apart and she won’t let me see my kid. You want to hate Jim like that in seven years?”  
  
“I’d rather hate him marginally less, to be honest.” A side benefit of their conversation was that McCoy wasn’t really concentrating on his side of the board, either. “Check.”  
  
“Goddammit.”  
  
Casual profanity was almost _comforting_ , coming from McCoy; it implied familiarity rather than the disrespect taken when other crewmembers used the same words. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do about your ex?” Nyota asked. “I’m sure I can get her some statistics about safety regs on the ship.”  
  
“It’s not the Enterprise she’s objectin’ to – it’s _me_ ,” McCoy said. He rubbed his forehead with the fingers of one hand, as though chasing away a headache in the making. “I know this is her way of gettin’ revenge.”  
  
“Hmm.” Well, surely Joanna had more family than just her mother. “Does Joanna have any other relatives I could talk to?” Covert messages from the recently-famous, Nyota surmised, would probably have more of an effect on people who didn’t hate McCoy’s guts for no good reason.  
  
“Yeah, Joanna has four grandparents.” McCoy paused, as though deliberating, then went on. “Probably thanks to that old hob – the other Spock, I mean. Him.”  
  
“What do you mean?” What information, other than Scotty’s formula, was so important that Ambassador Spock had seen fit to reveal it?  
  
“He told me how to cure my father,” McCoy said. “Apparently, in about five years, he’s gonna get a wasting disease there’s no cure for, and he just _told_ me the cure. Came up’n talked to me, and saved his life.” Apparently, the fact that the old Vulcan had done so was still amazing to the doctor, judging by how slowly he shook his head. _Amazement_ , Nyota thought. Ambassador Spock had managed to gobsmack the un-impressable McCoy.  
  
“That’s incredible,” she said. “How many times has he saved someone’s life, now?”  
  
He grinned. “Probably ‘bout three zillion, at the last count. Guess he’s so old that the Prime Directive answers to _him_.”  
  
“Good one.” She smiled back at him. Ambassador Spock _did_ seem that old, sometimes.  
  
“Yeah. So my parents are still livin’ in Georgia, and so’re Jocelyn’s parents. Her sister Jennifer is in New York with her wife and their kids.”  
  
“Adopted?” Nyota asked.  
  
“Their oldest daughter is,” McCoy answered. “The younger twins are biologically Jen’s. Sperm donor.”  
  
“You know, it’s weird,” she said, and moved her right rook. “We can warp through space and engineer alien-human hybrids, but we still can’t help two women have children together? Where are our priorities?” She glanced at the board again. “Check, and probably checkmate if you don’t move your king.”  
  
“Ah, _Christ_.” He was quick to move his king, and Nyota had to laugh at the look on his face. It was so _frantic_ , as though this were major surgery instead of a game of chess. “Thanks for the heads-up.”  
  
“You’re welcome.” He probably wouldn’t end up beating her at the game, even with the hint; she was rusty, but Nyota guessed that he was as well. “Do you…do you miss your family?” Tentatively asked, of course; besides Joanna, it seemed unlikely that McCoy could miss anyone.  
  
One shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Sometimes. I’ve been away from home for ‘bout thirteen years, so it’s not much worse here on the tin can.” McCoy stroked his chin with one palm. “There’s comms and all, so at least I get to talk to ‘em.”  
  
“That’s comforting, I imagine,” Nyota said.  
  
“Yeah. How ‘bout you? You weren’t cooked up by some bunch of linguists, I bet.”  
  
Oh…he was _teasing_ her. How odd. “My parents are alive,” she said, “and so are three of my grandparents. I have two brothers, one older, one younger.”  
  
“Yeah?” He rested his chin in his palm and put an elbow up on the chess table. “Want to tell me about ‘em?”  
  
“Sure.” Nyota wasn’t sure why he was asking about _her_ family, given that his family problems were the main focus of the conversation. “Adili is twenty-six and Ekevu is twenty-one. They’re both at Kenyatta University, but Ekevu is an undergrad and Adili is studying for his Ph.D.”  
  
“Impressive. Bet your parents are proud of y’all.” He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and chewed meditatively on it, probably trying to figure out how to get out of the chess trap. Nyota couldn’t help but feel sorry for him; he’d backed himself into a corner by not moving the pawns surrounding his king. She made the same mistake herself often enough, but had managed to avoid it this time. Probably because she wasn’t playing against Spock. “Check.”  
  
Ouch. So he’d been finding _her_ vulnerable spots rather than checking his. “Touché,” she said. “Clever move, _Doctor_ McCoy.”  
  
“What, so you think a doctor can’t be more’n decent at chess?” He raised a sardonic eyebrow at her. “I _did_ pass physics and organic chemistry, y’know. I ain’t a moron.”  
  
“I never said you were,” Nyota told him, raising her own eyebrow at him (she couldn’t raise both independently, like Spock could, but her left eyebrow had still reduced more than one person to tears). “I just said that you made a clever move.”  
  
“And you emphasized my title. My ears work just fine.”  
  
“All right, point taken.” Nyota touched a piece, ready to move it, then thought better of it. “I think the only way this game is going to end is if we declare a stalemate. I don’t see a way for either of us to win.”  
  
“Stalemate, then.” McCoy leaned back in his chair and ran one hand through his hair (not as dark as Spock’s, but then again, whose hair _was_ as dark as Spock’s? It looked soft, though). “Knew I needed practice.”  
  
“You played well. _I’m_ the one who needs practice,” Nyota said. “If I hadn’t tried that opening move with the knight, maybe you would’ve been able to put more pawns forward…” She trailed off; no wonder Spock found the game so intriguing. There were _infinite_ combinations. _IDIC_ , she thought, and smiled.  
  
“What’s so funny, Lieutenant?” McCoy leaned forward, staring at her. “Still my chess playin’? I’m pretty sure I’m better’n a hungover Orion.”  
  
“Hey, hey, I roomed with a hungover Orion,” she said. “At least three times a week, anyway. I was just smiling because I realized why Spock likes chess so much. There are so many possible combinations of moves. I don’t think we could play them all out if we tried.”  
  
“We? You want to play again sometime?”  
  
Hm. She hadn’t really thought about it, but come to think of it, another game or two of chess with McCoy didn’t seem like such an unpleasant prospect. “Sure.”  
  
“We just gotta find a time when Jim and the h… _Spock_ ain’t got this place booked solid. I swear, it’s all Jim likes to do nowadays.”  
  
That was news to her; after all, Nyota didn’t keep track of what Spock did off-duty anymore. “Really?”  
  
“Yep. I go to yell at Jim for forgettin’ to come get his goddamn allergy hypos, and all he can talk about is Spock this and chess that, blah, blah.” He shook his head, but it looked like a _my best friend is obsessed, how hilarious_ shake, not a pissed-off one. “I think he’s annoyed ‘cause he keeps losin’.”  
  
“See, I think that’s amusing, not annoying,” Nyota said, setting her pieces back up for the next person. “I’d be amused if Spock lost to _him_.”  
  
McCoy shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he will, and then he’ll giggle ‘bout it over a couple beers next time we’re on shore leave.”  
  
“Mm.” Now _there_ was an image Nyota could envision very well – Jim Kirk, triumphant and giggling, no matter what McCoy said in his defense. “Truth be told, I’m more worried about the away mission than shore leave, and I’m not even worried about that.”  
  
“Away mission…?” Hazel eyes clouded over, searching, then cleared. “Yeah, I remember. You be careful, now.”  
  
“Careful?” Nyota blinked. “It’s a simple reconnaissance mission. We’re not even trying to negotiate for dilithium. The Aurelians are _Federation_ , Doctor McCoy.”  
  
“I don’t trust ‘em.” McCoy shook his head. “They look like fuckin’ giant _pterodactyls_ , Lieutenant. Talons and everything. Call me crazy, but I’d be on my guard.”  
  
It was Nyota’s turn to shake her head…in disgust. “Not everyone is a xenophobe, Doctor.” First he took potshots at Spock, and then he insulted a perfectly respectable species because of how they _looked?_ Just awful. _Oh, terrible_ , as Chekov was wont to say.  
  
“All right, all right.” His eyes flicked down to the board, as though reassuring himself that he’d finished putting everything back where it needed to be. “I was out of line. I’m just nervous ‘cause we haven’t done so many of these things.”  
  
His explanation sounded weak, but Nyota couldn’t think of anything else that fit better. Or maybe he _was_ a closet xenophobe after all, but it would be harder to reconcile herself to it – that a prickly-soft man who fought to see his daughter would hate people just because they weren’t born on Earth, or had green blood, or were just plain _different_. “Fine,” she murmured, and stood up. “I’ll check in with you after the away mission, just to let you know the Aurelians haven’t killed me.”  
  
Even in her darkened quarters later, lit up only by the glow of her PADD, Nyota still felt that uneasy sadness in the pit of her stomach. _Obsessing_ , her father had called it whenever she fixated on one subject as a little girl. But hatred from McCoy was so inconceivable as to warrant her attention.  
  
 **To:** elmccoy@ggeologists.gov  
 **From** : n.uhura@ncc-1701.fed  
  
 _Mrs. McCoy,  
  
You don’t know me, but my name is Nyota Uhura. I serve on the Enterprise with your son, Dr. Leonard McCoy, and consider him a friend._  
  
Nyota stopped typing for a moment, considering; it wasn’t strictly true, as McCoy was more of an acquaintance (or something along those lines, the lines that blurred with every moment she spent with him), but who would it hurt to fudge the truth?  
  
 _Normally, I wouldn’t write to you about an issue that doesn’t concern me, but I was recently made aware of the fact that your son’s ex-wife is refusing to allow him to see his daughter, Joanna. Her justification is that the Enterprise is unsafe. I’ve enclosed a copy of the ship’s latest inspection results, approximately two months old, so as to disprove this.  
  
Dr. McCoy would very much like to see Joanna for her birthday, and as communications officer, I can say that there are few places that would be safer for her to visit. If there is anything that I can do to convince Ms. McCoy and/or arrange such a visit, please notify me.  
  
Sincerely,  
Lt. Nyota Uhura  
Communications Officer, U.S.S. Enterprise  
Starfleet, UFP  
_  
  
The second message was harder to write; when was the last time she’d asked Kirk for help with anything? Nyota couldn’t remember even one incident, probably because _she_ was the one who diplomatically handled screw-ups. But for McCoy, she’d stomach the asking.  
  
She’d figure out why _later._  
  
 **To** : j.kirk@ncc-1701.fed  
 **From** : n.uhura@ncc-1701.fed  
  
 _Captain Kirk,  
  
If there’s anything that can be done to resolve Dr. McCoy’s family problems, I’m willing to help. He’s in a funk and it’s completely unnecessary.  
  
Lieutenant Uhura._  
  
Nyota shut off her PADD, leaving the room nearly dark. It was so strange to think of McCoy as a _father_. She’d seen him assume a quasi-paternal attitude, mostly towards the bridge crew (save for her, bizarrely enough), but…actually having a child? It was…un-McCoyish, to be honest, especially given the way he’d acted a few hours before.  
  
She looked at the digital wall-display – 0114 – and groaned. The away mission wasn’t for another week, but the Aurelians were notorious for their subtle body language; she’d be busy until then with mission briefs and language practice. It was like dancing, in a way, of a sort that could get the Enterprise into a whole lot of trouble if her translation failed. Sometimes she _really_ hated the pressure of her job.  
  
 _McCoy_. Why did her thoughts keep going back to him...him and his ex-wife, him and his child? _Family_. Maybe it was just that she missed hers, out in space without even the comfort of her and her brothers watching the same moon in different time zones (“Ny- _oooo_ -ta, guess who sees the Man in the Moon,” Ekevu liked to laugh into his PADD every time he commed her. “Your brother who’s never left the planet!”).  
  
Or it could be the fact that to _have_ a child, barring insemination, McCoy and Jocelyn had to _conceive_ a child. Sex with McCoy – had Jocelyn enjoyed it? The thought was almost…almost arousing.  
  
Yeah, so she was probably just tired, and horny from six months of no sex; what else would make her think of intimacy with someone so cantankerous? Still…hm. 0118. She needed sleep, and climaxing usually helped tire her out enough for it.  
  
Nyota closed her eyes and put her PADD down, lying back on her bed and scooting out of her pajama bottoms. McCoy would be…dirty, she thought, when he fucked; demanding, maybe, _definitely_ not one to be gentle, even though he wouldn’t hurt a partner. An image came to her head: him sprawled on a bed, a faceless woman on top of him, riding him while his face showed his pleasure and his hips bucked upwards.  
  
 _Come on, goddammit, faster_ , she imagined him saying, as she pressed two fingers between her legs, rubbing wetness onto her clit. _Fuck, Jocelyn!_  
  
Her fingers slowed; no, that wasn’t right. She couldn’t imagine him, not even on her own, willingly having sex with a woman he obviously hated now. It was a _fantasy_ , wasn’t it? She could imagine the woman on top of him to be anyone.  
  
 _Nyota,_ the imaginary McCoy-voice rumbled. Nyota gasped and smiled at the pleasure of it, even as her clit swelled under her forefinger. _Fuck, Nyota!_  
  
“Fuck, _McCoy_ ,” she groaned in reply to the empty room. It was so _weird_ , not thinking of Spock when she brought herself off, but it had been six months, after all. Her fantasies were overdue for a change.  
  
She swirled her fingers in her juices and slid two, slowly, inside herself. Her own hips thrust up, even before she crooked them to touch her G-spot; it had been a while, _far_ too long since she’d touched herself. Against the smooth, circling pad of her thumb, her clit was hard and wet. “ _Jamii, mapenzi_ ,” she ground out, too worked up even for Standard.  
  
Would the doctor know, or care, to give a woman pleasure like this? Would his fingers touch her as she was doing to herself? Nyota shivered at the thought, and at the orgasm that approached. She drove her hips down on her fingers, mindless of the cramps that began in her finger muscles at the intense pressure. As she began to pant, her breath coming hard with pleasure and exertion, she thought of a male voice. Not Spock, not McCoy, just _male_ , low and rumbly and moaning her name while he pleased himself and her.  
  
“Ah, _jamii!_ ” Her hips strained forward, vaginal muscles contracting against her hand as her mouth clenched shut in an effort to keep from making noise. “ _Wala kuacha_ ,” she breathed as the orgasm subsided. It was too short for her liking, but weren’t they all, these days? She smiled, satisfied and sleepy, remembering the early frustration; now this was normal.  
  
She glanced at the wall-display again: 0134, the numbers flashed in her mind as she tucked her sore hand under her stomach and closed her eyes.


	3. The Away Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An away mission goes terribly wrong, and Nyota experiences the fallout. 
> 
> (The Aurelians and the Skorr are TAS canon, although I took the liberty of messing with the timeline a little.)

  
  
Annoyingly, there was some information missing from the mission report: namely, _why_ they were meeting the peaceable Aurelian delegation on some uninhabited moon in the Aurel system instead of on their home planet. Nyota frowned at her PADD screen and read the ‘Location’ section again; no, all it said was _The away team will beam down to Etanis Beta at 1200 ship standard time_ , giving stellar and planetary coordinates for transportation. Probably Chekov and Scotty would find that useful, but she didn’t.   
  
There was only one thing to do: find the “guy in charge” (as the guy in question liked to refer to himself) and clarify the report. Like some hopped-up college professor, Kirk had sent out a list of office hours at the beginning of the mission, stating when he would be available in his quarters for questions, comments, and “adulation” (yes, that was a direct quote, but to be fair, he was probably joking). His quarters were in the same corridor as hers were, with the rest of the senior staff; convenient enough to find him, but that didn’t mean it was going to be pleasant.   
  
At 1930 hours, Nyota knocked on his door. “Hold on, someone’s at the door,” came Kirk’s voice in a low tone; she could tell it wasn’t directed towards her, but to whoever else was in the room with him. _Seriously?_ she thought, rolling her eyes. “Who is it?” he asked, this time obviously directed her way. Was that excitement she heard in his voice? Sex during ‘office hours’…she wouldn’t put it past him.   
  
“It’s Lieutenant Uhura,” she said. “I have a question about the mission brief.”   
  
“Come on in,” he said; the door slid open, and she went in with some apprehension. Who was going to be naked this time? Gaila? Christine Chapel?   
  
But Kirk’s bed was empty. He was sitting at his desk, paperwork shoved off to the side in favor of his hands resting on the surface. Across from him, seated in a plain synth-plastic chair, was _Spock_. “Commander!” Nyota exclaimed, too surprised to modulate her voice. “What are you doing here?”   
  
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” Spock said. “I am having a discussion with the captain.”   
  
Hmm. Kirk’s face _was_ flushed, and his eyes were bright, but it seemed that the only excitement he was feeling was the non-intimate kind. Conversations with Spock tended to arouse that response in intelligent people. “Hey,” he greeted her with a smile. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”   
  
“The mission brief is confusing,” she said simply; ‘what’s up’, indeed. “It says the away mission is going to take place on Etanis Beta instead of Aurelia. Did I read it wrong, or did something happen?”   
  
Kirk shook his head. “You didn’t read it wrong – I’ve had a few people ask me that already. The admiralty didn’t give me many details, but I heard the Aurelian government is dealing with a lot of problems right now. It’s safer to meet off-planet.”   
  
Nyota frowned. “I thought their system was peaceful, for the most part.” That was what she’d learned about the species in Interspecies Protocol, anyway. It had been a short overview, but she would have thought Starfleet’s information was accurate.   
  
“They are,” he answered, and leaned forward, one elbow on the desk. “Admiral Pike just didn’t want to risk his ass and send the flagship into a situation that could be avoided.”   
  
“Captain,” Spock said, “the probability that Admiral Pike would adopt such an unprofessional attitude is less than two point nine six percent.” That was his _I can’t believe I work with such humans_ expression, an amusing one to watch.   
  
Kirk shrugged, smiling a (admittedly) very nice smile at him. “My words, not his. Besides which, does that take _every_ contingency into account, Commander?” Why was he so intent on using titles all of a sudden?   
  
“My estimate takes into account as many contingencies as I deem possible, Captain.” Spock’s voice was prim. “Lieutenant Uhura should not be subjected to your interpretations of Starfleet protocol if they are inaccurate.”   
  
“Ouch,” Kirk shuddered. “Vulcan-burned. I can’t believe you managed to put up with him, Lieutenant.” He turned to Nyota, for once not wearing his insincere smirk, the one that made _her_ want to strangle him (lack of Vulcan strength aside).   
  
“Well,” she said lightly (was she actually _joking_ with him?), smiling back, “I got used to him.” Spock wouldn’t take offense, not when they were so patently not serious. “He’s an acquired taste, though.”   
  
“What, literally or figuratively?” Kirk raised and lowered his eyebrows a few times, making Nyota groan. It seemed he never would change, but the fact remained that he had been able to have a civil conversation with someone without it devolving into sex. Interesting.   
  
“If you don’t mind my asking, Captain, what were you two discussing?” she asked. As always, she had to repress a wince when she called Kirk by his title; to her, he was always just plain Jim Kirk, smart and horny bastard. “You look a bit riled up by it.”   
  
“Glad you asked, _Lieutenant_.” Kirk jerked a thumb in Spock’s direction. “I was telling Mr. Obstinate over here that _if_ the Fleet’s ships could be powered by something other than dilithium, something renewable, politics would do a complete turnaround.”   
  
Spock made no comment to the epithet (weird, as she didn’t think he normally stood for such insults), but said to Nyota, “I told the captain that, should such a hypothetical situation occur, Starfleet’s politics would not deviate considerably from the norm. It is a peacekeeping armada and I believe it would remain such.”   
  
“Oh, come on!” Kirk pounded a hand on the desk, obviously enjoying himself. “Look, if we didn’t have to go through hostile territory for our fuel…just imagine it. We could tell the Klingons to go fuck themselves, for one.”   
  
“I have a hard time believing you hate Klingons all that much,” Nyota said, “seeing as you’re doing your best to emulate one right now.” She was teasing him, sure, but that was uncomfortably similar to what McCoy had said about Aurelians the other day.   
  
“Right.” Kirk rolled his eyes. “You can sit down if you want,” he added, indicating the second chair across from him. Nyota did; this was a surprisingly fun debate. “Anyway,” he said to Spock, “I think Starfleet’s only a peacekeeping armada _because_ of the hostile species. If we could just tell them we won’t put up with them…”   
  
“Would such a change of attitude not promote autocracy within the Federation, in that case?” Spock said. “As the Terran expression goes, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’, is that not so?”   
  
“I don’t think an automatic source of renewable fuel would necessarily lead to an autocracy,” Nyota said. “I mean, I agree with what you said about Starfleet’s motives not changing in the first place, but I agree more with Kirk about why it started.”   
  
“Yeah!” Kirk’s eyes were alight.   
  
“Then, of course, you run the risk of those hostile species forming a coalition against Starfleet,” she added. “Or even the Federation itself.”   
  
“Lieutenant Uhura proposes a fascinating scenario,” Spock said. “Captain, in your opinion, what would be the most diplomatic method of preventing such a united coalition?”   
  
“Not sure.” Kirk tapped his chin. “I guess…well, we would’ve kind of caused it in the first place, I guess. With the… _dammit_ , Spock!” He broke off in a chuckle. “Is that your way of saying I fire first and think later?”   
  
“Affirmative, Captain.” Spock nodded.   
  
Kirk picked up a stylus and pointed it at him. “You suck.” But he grinned as he said it, before turning to Nyota. “How are you not in command track?”   
  
The look in his blue eyes, for once, was merely curious, not mischievous. “I thought I’d be better suited for communications, really,” she said after a pause. Few people had ever asked her that. “I suppose I prefer diplomacy on the front lines to delegation.”   
  
“Okay, you do have a point.” Kirk rolled his eyes in the direction of the piled-up paperwork and winced. “You get to avoid the paperwork, anyway. Why they see fit to send me print-only stuff, I’ll never understand…” he trailed off, lost in thought, before the conversation at hand seemed to come back to him. “You should come in here with questions more often.”   
  
Oh. That _was_ why she’d come in, hadn’t she? It hadn’t been to get in on a conversation between her superior officers. “I’m sorry to have interrupted,” Nyota said. Kirk certainly wouldn’t report her for this or anything like that, but it was still embarrassing to have acted unprofessionally after all the training she’d had to the contrary.   
  
“No, no, it’s fine.” He waved a hand. “It was more interesting with you in here, anyway.”  
  
“I found both variations fascinating, Captain,” Spock said, one eyebrow raised.   
  
“Thank you.” She wasn’t quite sure which of them she was thanking (maybe both), but it was probably time for her to leave, anyway. Spending too much time in Kirk-space made her uncomfortable. “I should get back to my quarters. Until tomorrow, Captain, Commander?”   
  
“Sure thing, _Nyota_ ,” Kirk said, winking at her and reminding her of another reason for her _not_ to have chosen command: more time with _him_.   
  


~

  
  
“Energize.”   
  
Out of habit, Nyota closed her eyes as the transporter took her down to the surface of Etanis Beta, the class-M moon where the away mission was to meet with the Aurelian delegation. She was fairly sure that with herself, Sulu, and Captain Effusive himself leading the mission (Spock had elected to stay on the ship, apparently due to an experiment gone awry), and Vani along with medical supplies, no one would end up dying before the Aurelians knew their name.   
  
When she opened her eyes again, it was to the sight of a bright sky, purple rather than blue, casting red-tinted light over a surprisingly hard, flat landscape; her boots tapped against it, a hollow sound. Tall grass, orange rather than green – apparently, the plants on this moon didn’t function via chlorophyll – stood still around them, in the absence of any noticeable wind. She thought of old-time prairies, the ones that had stood before industry, and was momentarily, oddly nostalgic for a past she’d never experienced.   
  
But they’d beamed down to these coordinates on a _mission_ , and as the group of Aurelians approached them (all right, McCoy was correct in that they looked like colorful, feathered pterodactyls), Kirk turned to the away team. “Let’s do this,” he said, far too chipper for a man who led Starfleet’s flagship. “Uhura, are you ready?”   
  
Nyota nodded and cleared her throat, all the better to handle the glottal stops, and greeted the delegation. “Greetings, my friends,” she said in Aurelish; the avian species preferred being referred to in the familiar, as it eased their innate stress levels. She saw the feathers on several delegates drop as they relaxed, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief. “We come here on a happy mission. We wish only to see you are well.”   
  
The leader of the delegation (she could tell by their ornate headgear) stepped forward. “Greetings, my friend,” it – she was a communications officer, not a biologist – said. “They call me Alhesen. It is good that you only come peacefully. Trouble with a certain group of the Skorr is raging around our world.” Blue eyes, oddly similar to Kirk’s, widened in what was an Aurelian question. “There are no Skorr among you.”   
  
“What’s he asking, Lieutenant Uhura?” Kirk broke in. Apparently, he’d also been stymied by the gender subtleties, and didn’t care.   
  
Nyota nodded at Alhesen. “Excuse me, please, great one,” she said, and at their approving head-bob, turned to the captain. “He says that there’s been trouble with a group of Skorr from a neighboring planet, and wanted to make sure that we didn’t number any Skorr in the group.”   
  
“Right, right, the Skorr. Tell him we don’t have any.”   
  
“All right.” Nyota turned back to the leader. “We have no Skorr. What is the trouble with the group on your world?” Kirk’s explanation had clarified why they were meeting on Etanis Beta, rather than on Aurelia, but he hadn’t mentioned specifics. The purple sky was giving Nyota a headache. Or was that the weirdly heavy feel of the air in her nose and lungs?   
  
“A small group is troubled that we Aurelians do not wish to conform to Alar’s pacifism,” Alhesen said. “They insist that Alar would allow violence to force this upon us. They are on the verge of much destruction.”   
  
Uhura, frowning, translated for the away team. An identical frown appeared on Kirk’s face; Sulu just looked worried, his brow creased in concern. “What would the effect of this conflict be on their dynamic within the Federation?” he asked. “I mean, we’re not that far from their system.”   
  
“What does that one say, _errdn?_ ” Alhesen cut in. Nyota bit her lip to keep from smiling. _Errdn_ , taken from the root word _ehr_ , or ‘mouth’, literally meant “flexible-mouthed one” in Aurelish. Kirk would have a real field day with that if he knew it; luckily, he didn’t speak the language.   
  
But it was important not to insult the delegation, with their interspecies situation so delicate, and Nyota closed her eyes, clearing all emotions from her face, before she answered. “Flier Sulu wishes to know if your fight with the Skorr will change things in the Federation.” Overly simplistic, given all the different governmental systems and conflicts incorporated therein, but she figured it was the least offensive answer possible. She paused to cough, hard, then added, “Apologies.”   
  
Alhesen cocked its head. “Your Federation has not caused the trouble, friend _errdn_ ,” it said. “We will try to quiet the conflict, but nothing is impossible. These Skorr are persistent.” A shrug lifted the huge, yellow-feathered shoulders, signifying derision, not confusion as it would in humans or Andorians.   
  
Nyota translated that for the away team. “Could have some pretty interesting ramifications, though,” Lieutenant Ryland offered. He scratched his head in thought, red sleeve bright against his blond hair. “If this is anything like the Andorian-Vulcan conflict, it might not develop into anything much, but…”   
  
“I see where you’re going,” Kirk said, interrupting, and nodded at Ryland. Nyota raised an eyebrow; would the man _never_ stop being an egomaniac? “Skorr aren’t Vulcans, and if what this guy is saying about violent tendencies is true, well…” He shrugged. “Uhura, could you ask where this renegade group seems to be aiming, in particular?”   
  
The words had just begun to come out of Nyota’s mouth (they were _hedrr zaa_ , she remembered later, _where aim_ , and she’d been ready to add on a question of her own about the possibility of intercession with the Skorr) when the rocks started flying. Or it seemed like they were rocks, by the rough, hard pain that obscured her field of vision when one hit her on the head. She fell to her knees involuntarily, as though something had cut the nerves to her legs, and heard the Aurelians start shrieking in fear.   
  
Over the noise, somehow, Kirk managed to make his voice heard. “Sulu! Ryland! Get the perimeter – those damn Skorr things…” His words swam in Nyota’s head, heavy as it was – Skorr? Had the group found them, then? She shook her head, trying to clarify, but only succeeded in creating pains that knifed through her skull with every movement. What was wrong with her sight? The grasses waved slowly, colorfully, in front of her eyes, closer than before. So she’d fallen.   
  
“Uhura?” Kirk’s voice, again, but it was closer this time. She could feel him shaking her arm, and it was only with difficulty that she swung her head around to look at him. “Come on, get up! We need out, _now_.” Somewhere out of her sight, someone that she dimly identified as Vani screamed in pain. All around them, the Aurelians’ shrieks mingled with deeper, more booming squawks in a harsher language. _No escape_ , she was able to make out, and _Alar_ , and _Starfleet, no protect, peace_ …something. Her head was throbbing, breathing labored with the effort of translation, or maybe the rock had hit her head harder than she thought.   
  
Kirk yanked her to her feet, hard enough to swirl the colors around in front of her eyes and make pain crackle through her skull like lightning. The planet tilted under her feet, back and forth, even as a giant Skorr bore down on someone not five steps away…someone with a sword?   
  
“Sulu!” Nyota shouted. Her arm twisted out of Kirk’s grip as she launched forward in a leap that would’ve astounded her, had she been truly cognizant of her surroundings. Thick air whistled in her ears, combined with the now-erratic thump of her heart, blending into a noise that marked her movements in her memories.   
  
Her hands were pushing against the Skorr’s chest, dark against the brightness, hard against the strange softness of its feathers…  
  
…sharp claws dug into her arms, raked across her chest, tore the skin of her neck, bringing a scream of utter pain to her throat that she could feel but not hear…  
  
…screaming. Screaming. Her throat was raw with it, but the adrenaline pounding through her wouldn’t let her hear it, even as she fell back into Sulu’s solidity, bringing them both down, cracking her heavy head against the hard ground, _twist_ , and her legs were spinning out from under her, too…  
  
…and _nothing_. The world disappeared, and she could feel nothing, hear nothing, when her vision blinked out as suddenly as a flipped light switch.   
  


~

  
  
Usually, it was a sound that woke her up, but plain silence roused her this time. It was…nice, listening to the nothing. Pleasant. After the Aurelian and Skorran squawks, it felt nice to have her ears filled with nothing but silence.   
  
Aurelians - _kinyeshi!_ The away mission!   
  
Nyota’s eyes opened slowly, as though they were heavier than normal, despite her distress. She couldn’t see much; sickbay was a gray-and-white blur, made up of strange blobby shapes. When she blinked to clear her vision, the room wavered, then coalesced into its familiar clarity. Empty, at least in her field of vision. Where were McCoy and M’Benga?   
  
Cool fingers touched her wrist, and Christine Chapel’s face appeared above her own. “Nyota, good, you’re awake,” she said, and smiled shakily. Her blue eyes, usually wide with good humor, were hollowed with dark circles, and her blonde bun was mussed. _How long have I been out?_ Nyota wondered. It had to have been a long time, if Christine had been awake for so long. “How do you feel?”   
  
“I don’t know,” Nyota said; her voice was rough, and only then did she realize her throat was hurting. “My…my head? How is it?” The cracking noise, when ground met bone, was still imprinted on her memory (she would have shuddered at it, if she had the energy to do so).   
  
Christine sighed. “It’s been better.” She reached out and laid her hand against the top of Nyota’s head, stroking through her hair. “You cracked your skull in at least two places. If Dr. McCoy hadn’t gotten you to an osteoregenerator, well…” A shake of her head; clearly, _she_ knew all too well what would have happened. “You’re going to be in here today, at least, for observation. Aside from your shiny new bone scars, you have cranial swelling, and you also _had_ some fairly nasty cuts from whatever scratched you.”   
  
So the Skorr had put her out of commission for a bit – Kirk wouldn’t be happy at that. A day wasn’t a very long time, but on a starship, a lot could happen over the course of twenty-four hours. “How’s Sulu?” she asked with some difficulty. Her tongue felt detached from her mouth. “Okay?”   
  
“He’s fine,” Christine said, and smiled. “A little bruised up, but all McCoy had to do was run the dermal regenerator and yell at him for a while. You really took the worst of it.”   
  
But that wasn’t possible! Cranial swelling or not, she could remember that Vani had been hit by something, and Ryland…what had happened to him? Was Kirk all right? He was a bastard most of the time, but he’d helped her up; that counted for something. “Anyone else?” Nyota swallowed, her throat dry even with that minimal effort, and asked, “They’re all okay?”   
  
“All…?” Christine’s brow furrowed in confusion for a moment before the meaning of the disjointed words broke through. “Oh, you mean the away team? They’re fine. Ensign Faeson dislocated a shoulder and Lieutenant Ryland is going to walk funny for a while, but that’s it. Do you want to sit up?” At Nyota’s nod, she pressed something on the side of the biobed; the top half rolled up into a slightly reclined position. “Even the captain just got away with some cuts and bruised muscles. He kept making fun of that, too…saying it was ‘just a flesh wound’ and shrieking whenever he got a hypospray.” She rolled her eyes.   
  
Well, Nyota hoped that Vani’s knitting shoulder wasn’t the one that had been dislocated. Kirk’s reactions didn’t surprise her one bit. “I _did_ get the worst.” Seated, she could almost feel where the cracks had been; her head was throbbing in a few places.   
  
“Yeah, you can say that again.” Christine leaned over, checking the biobed readings, and shook her head. “Head trauma, abrasions, _lung_ trauma…what the hell happened down there?”   
  
Nyota blinked. “Lung trauma?” She’d knocked into Sulu pretty hard, but she didn’t think it was hard enough to bruise her _lungs_. She must’ve taken a harder rock to the head than she thought.   
  
Christine glanced at the readings again. “It was some kind of allergic reaction to a particle in the air. You’ve never been to the Aurel system, I’m assuming.” Nyota shook her head. “Right. So it wouldn’t have shown up in your records before. You’ll be okay, but McCoy had you on a respirator for an hour or so.”   
  
It was odd, how many times Christine had mentioned McCoy’s care in the past few minutes. “Why him?” Nyota said, and turned her head to cough against her shoulder – now that Christine mentioned it, her chest _did_ hurt, not just her throat. “Was it that bad?” She looked around; no one else was in the biobeds beside her. A few nurses she didn’t recognize (probably the ones on a different shift; had she really been out so long?) were doing various things, but it didn’t look at all like the scene of a recent away team rush-in.   
  
“Mm….” Christine bit her lip, as Nyota had noticed she did when she was thinking hard. “Comparatively, yeah, but I’m sure he’s seen worse. I think he was just worried about you.”   
  
“He never worries.” Grumped, yeah, and told people they were idiots, but _worried?_ No. At least, not that she could tell. And he certainly wouldn’t have undue cause to worry about _her_ …even if it made her feel rather fuzzy inside to think that he did.   
  
Christine grinned. “Oh, yes, he does,” she said. “You should’ve seen him. Yelling all over the place about ‘idiot birds’, and he ran down to the transporter room to wait for you as soon as he heard you were injured.”   
  
“Really?” That was news to her. McCoy had been on standby for injuries before, but they’d usually involved considerable blood loss. If all he’d heard was her name in conjunction with an injury, well, it was pretty uncharacteristic for him to go running off. “Why?”   
  
“He has his reasons.” Huh. It wasn’t like Christine to be closemouthed. If McCoy _had his reasons_ for wanting to heal her injuries first, Nyota wanted to know what they were. She managed a glare; injured as she was, it was effective enough. “Personally,” Christine conceded, and looked around before continuing in a lower voice, “I think he has a soft spot for you.”   
  
…yeah. She’d ask again when her head was clear; she was obviously hearing things. McCoy, wanting to be friends with her? That wouldn’t happen, except in her own imagination. “Then where is he?” Nyota asked. If he’d been so eager to get to her, why wasn’t he here? Illogical.   
  
“He’s asleep,” Christine said. “Kirk and I got him to go to bed after about twenty-five hours. He looked just _awful_ , too.” She raised an eyebrow. “Hadn’t left sickbay since you got in. I mean, he had to take time to treat everyone else, but he spent most of the time with you.”   
  
Nyota snorted, and then regretted it, as it hurt her head. “Couldn’t have been interesting.” Why would anyone in their right mind want to spend time with someone who was unconscious? Concerned or not, surely McCoy had had better things to do.   
  
The _swish_ came that signaled a set of doors opening. Nyota looked around, curious – was this McCoy coming back in? – but Christine’s sigh answered the question for her. “Oh, speak of the devil and he appears. _Still_ sleepless, I might add!” she called in McCoy’s direction as he stormed in.   
  
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied, voice acerbic. Truth be told, though, faulty as Nyota’s senses were right now, he _did_ look pretty bad. The same dark circles that were present on Christine’s face darkened his own, and his normally smooth (for a human, anyway) hair was incredibly messy. Had he slept at all?   
  
“Hello, Doctor,” she said as he approached the foot of the biobed, and smiled at him, tiring though it was.   
  
“God _dammit_ ,” was his response, “don’t you do that to me again, Lieutenant. You realize how fuckin’ _dangerous_ that situation was? Jesus shitting Christ, Nyota!” He wasn’t just staring her in the face; his eyes were downright _drilling_ into hers. Angry. Concerned?   
  
“It wasn’t on purpose!” It was a little offensive that he would assume she just jumped into a harmful situation to spite him. “For your information, I…” Her breath caught in her throat and she coughed again, hard, into her shoulder, unable to suppress a groan of pain afterwards. No wonder the Etanis air had felt so strange in her lungs, if this was what it had done to her.   
  
Wait…had he actually used her first name? _That_ was a first.   
  
“That hurts, huh?” Nyota blinked at him. Was it her imagination that his face had softened, or that the timbre of his voice was no longer so accusatory? “Nurse,” he said, directing this towards Christine, “I think I can handle this from here.”   
  
“With all due respect, _Doctor_ \- “ and Nyota had to smile, remembering how that same emphasis on her part had annoyed McCoy – “ _I_ think two hours of sleep, if you’ve slept at all, is barely enough to stay coherent, let alone functional.” Christine folded her arms, lifting her chin to stare at him.   
  
McCoy sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Look, Chapel, she’s sustained the worst injuries of the entire away team. I’d like to be able to check her over _myself_ , if you don’t mind.” He raised an eyebrow at her, the expressive one that could convey anything from amusement to annoyance. “Unless y’think your medical opinion trumps the CMO’s.” It was extremely weird, sitting in a biobed while McCoy and Chapel argued over who was going to sit next to her and check the vitals on the biobed. If she didn’t think it would make things worse, or if it hadn’t hurt her throat, Nyota would have laughed; instead, she sat back and waited. This argument would eventually burn itself out.   
  
“My God, fine.” Christine stood up; at five-nine, she was about four inches shorter than he was, but the expression on her face (identical to his) made her seem just as formidable. “You want to screw up your circadian rhythms, be my guest.” She turned, beginning to walk away, then shot back over her shoulder, “Unless drinking nights with Captain Kirk haven’t already destroyed the ones you have.”   
  
“ _Once_ a goddamn month, Chapel!” McCoy shouted in her direction, but didn’t seem too bothered (was this sort of banter a regular occurrence, then? If so, maybe she didn’t have to worry about it being Vulcan-specific). He took Christine’s position, seated on the side of the biobed, and looked at the biobed display as she had. “How’re you feelin’, Lieutenant?” he asked.   
  
Nyota made some semblance of a shrug. It was getting far easier to talk, now that she wasn’t lying flat on her back; maybe that helped with the cranial swelling. “Did I really crack my skull?” She believed it, all right, but maybe Christine had exaggerated how severe the injury was.   
  
McCoy nodded. “You sure as hell did. Three fractures, and that wasn’t even all of it. S’pose Chapel’s already told you about that.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Jim’s pretty goddamn impressed, you know.”   
  
“He is?”   
  
“Yeah. You’re lookin’ at a commendation, at least, and something else…” He cocked his head at her. “Not to bother you while you’re healin’, but I got a message from my _mother_ ‘bout an hour ago. She talked to the city judge.” He paused; Nyota wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but given that he wasn’t screaming at her, it was probably good.   
  
“And?” she said.   
  
“ _And_ , she says,” McCoy snorted, his glance turning incredulous. “And she fought the custody rulin’ somehow. Jo gets to come here for an early birthday in a few weeks, pendin’ Starfleet’s approval for a turnaround and Admiral Komack’s good mood.” His hand came up again to rub through his hair. “Why the hell did you do that? She got messages from Jim _and_ you about wantin’ to help me.”   
  
“Probably the same reason you called me Nyota,” she answered. How he knew it was her, she didn’t know; either he was perceptive, or his mother had forwarded him the original message. “We’re friends.” She swallowed. “Aren’t we?”   
  
“Yeah,” he said, his wide hazel eyes now definitely soft with some emotion or other. “Yeah, we are. _Nyota_.”   
  
His eyes were lovely like that, Nyota realized; one could really focus on his long eyelashes when they weren’t trained in a death glare, on the pretty green-brown color. “So that’s why I commed your mother,” she told him, her voice as quiet as his. “Because we’re friends. You were miserable and I thought I could help.”   
  
“ _Miserable_ ,” McCoy grumbled. “Pissed off, yeah, but I think you’re a little overmedicated if you think my ex’s stubbornness made me _miserable_.”   
  
“Are you judging your own dosages, _Doctor?_ ” Nyota couldn’t resist asking. _You’re being a hypocrite_ would be a little ungrateful at this juncture.   
  
McCoy broke off mid-splutter, his mouth hanging open. “No,” he finally said. “I’m not.”   
  
“And?” She was only human, after all, and if McCoy was going to play the ‘stubborn male’ role, Nyota was determined to see him eat his words. And humble pie.   
  
“So you were right. I was miserable, and you caught me.” He blushed, cheeks turning an adorable shade of pink (so different from the adorable shade of green to which Nyota had been accustomed, and waitaminute, why was she thinking about Spock? She didn’t need to think about Spock). “I missed my goddamn kid.” His head shook slowly back and forth. “God, she’s gonna love this ship. Jim’ll be over the moon to see someone who’s even more immature than he is.”   
  
“I think he and…” Nyota drew in her breath, or tried to, as her lungs rebelled against the prolonged talking, making her cough again. “Sorry. I think he and Ensign Chekov are about tied in that department.” She swallowed and cleared her throat; the coughing had hurt her heavy lungs and scraped her throat raw.   
  
“No, no, Jim’s got that kid beat by a mile.” McCoy leaned forward and placed his hand on her chest, just over her breastbone. “Does that hurt, Lieu…Nyota?”   
  
She shook her head. His hand was warm against what she realized was a sickbay gown, warming her skin right through it. “Only when I cough, not when you touch me.”   
  
“Good. I don’t have to worry about a spreading infection, then. You’re still getting the allergens out.” He kept his hand there just a second longer before removing it; for a moment, Nyota wished he hadn’t. He was warm, and so comfortable to touch. “I could get a hypo for that, if you want one.”  
  
“What, you’re _offering?_ I thought what the patient wanted didn’t make a difference.” Her voice was a bit raspy still, and she coughed a little into one fist to clear it out.   
  
“Yeah, well, your name’s not Jim,” McCoy answered. He patted her hand a little tentatively, as though unsure whether or not she was going to be angry at him for such an innocent action. “Speakin’ of,” he continued, “Jim was in here for a while earlier. Wanted to make sure you were all right ‘fore he went to fill out the report.”   
  
Nyota’s eyes widened. “He was?”   
  
“Yeah, he was,” McCoy said, nodding. “All torn up about it, too. He kept sayin’ it was his fault you got hurt and he shoulda beamed you up earlier.”   
  
“No.” She shook her head. Standard procedure _was_ to blame Kirk, but the man obviously felt terrible enough on his own. Who was she to cast aspersions on him, when he’d only been doing his job? “It was an accident. No one knew about the Skorr attack.” Her head throbbed, a reminder of what had happened down on the moon, and she rubbed it with the fingertips of one hand. “He shouldn’t blame himself.”   
  
“Hm. I’ll tell him y’said so,” McCoy smirked. “Not like he spent enough time in here, anyway. He just stayed long enough for me to fix up his cuts, then skedaddled out. I think he’s sickbay-phobic.”   
  
“No, just hypospray-phobic.” _For a good reason_ , she wanted to add, but it was funnier to imagine the hypospray victim’s reactions than to chastise the giver. Or stabber, as it were. “That’s just Kirk for you,” she said instead.   
  
“Yeah, that’s Jim,” McCoy agreed, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “The shit that kid got up to in the Academy is still the faculty’s worst nightmare. All of ‘em.”   
  
“I bet it is.” Nyota stretched her legs under the thin covers, realizing too late that it wasn’t the best idea when her muscles cramped. “Ow.”   
  
“Legs givin’ ya trouble?” McCoy asked. She nodded. “’Nother thing on the list of hyposprays,” he grumbled. “Lung pain, headache, probably muscle cramps, considerin’ how long you’ve been lyin’ down. Least the cuts are healed.”   
  
“That’s a plus,” she said. Of all the people to be knocked on the head with a rock, it _had_ to be her. “So, how many hyposprays would that be?” He didn’t punch the things into her neck, to be sure, but she did prefer not to be doped up when she’d only been awake a little while.   
  
“Well, there’re a few options,” he replied, and thoughtfully sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. “I could give you a general hypo for pain and an antihistamine for the allergic reaction. Dr. Knowles should be on duty, so she could probably give you a muscle massage. I could take you to your quarters so you can shower, or you can go with nothin’ and keep feelin’ the damn pain.”   
  
“Wait, what?” Nyota chuckled. “I wasn’t going to refuse medication. Also, I don’t have a water shower in my quarters, just a sonic one.”   
  
“Right, right, y’all have to use the communals.” McCoy knocked himself lightly in the forehead with his palm. “Stupid of me. Yeah, that’s just what I say to Jim whenever he starts wailin’ ‘bout how he doesn’t want a hypo this, and he’s _perfectly healthy_ that. Fuckin’ ridiculous.”   
  
“I assume he’d be dead in some gutter if it wasn’t for you,” she remarked.   
  
“Yeah, probably.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Half the damn bridge crew, really. All of ‘em are reckless morons, save maybe you and Sulu.”   
  
“Sulu was the one who tried to go up against a seven-foot Skorr with just a retractable sword,” she reminded him. “I wouldn’t call that sensible.”   
  
“Well, Chekov won’t have more brains than what’re between his legs ‘til he actually hits puberty, so that rules him out, too.”   
  
The matter-of-fact tone to McCoy’s voice made Nyota laugh, in spite the fact that it made her head ache and her throat burn. “ _Shit_ ,” she managed, before coughs overtook her. With every tremor, pressure pounded against the front of her head. “Just…just don’t insult people around me. It’s too funny.” She pressed the back of one hand against her mouth, having nothing else with which to wipe it.   
  
“Didn’t mean to set you off.” The worried tilt to his dark eyebrows spoke more than any apology ever would; he _was_ concerned. He cared about her; she could see it in his entire body, the way he leaned in towards her and kept asking questions and had stayed up for a _day_ to see that she was all right.   
  
As suddenly as if someone had pushed a button inside her brain, Nyota’s mood shifted. Her vision blurred again, not because of a head injury this time, but with tears. “Dammit…!” She rubbed one hand hard against her eyes as her shoulders slumped. How could she have failed on a simple away mission? Of all the people, all the _Starfleet officers_ , she’d been the one to get knocked on the head. The admiralty was probably regretting their assignment.   
  
“Nyota?” McCoy’s hand was on her shoulder. “You all right?”   
  
Nyota kept her head down; if she looked at him, the tears trickling out would only come harder. Instead, she nodded and wiped her eyes, hoping that he would get the message; it was all just _too much_ right now. Too. Damn. Much. A few rounds of mandatory psych classes at the Academy told her this was just normal away mission fallout, shock leading to hysteria and all that, but that didn’t make it any less embarrassing when it happened to her.   
  
She felt McCoy’s weight shift and lighten at the foot of the bed, and heard a swish. Good, he’d put up the privacy curtain. Sickbay might not have been full, but if _one_ person saw, it would be all around the ship that Lieutenant Uhura, she of the sharp tongue, had been seen crying her eyes out.   
  
“All right, now, darlin’. Just get it out.” He sat down on the bed next to her. An arm wound around her shoulders, steadying her as the sobs, coming faster and faster now, rocked her forward. She leaned her head on McCoy’s shoulder to muffle them; he stroked her hair, fingers soothing against her aching head. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”   
  
How long did she sit there, crying against him? Nyota wasn’t sure. But she couldn’t think of a better place, if she had to, to completely lose it. McCoy was warm and strong, and he smelled comfortingly of soap. He murmured her name, low-voiced, over and over, and that she’d be okay, nothing was going to hurt her.   
  
Finally, she was able to slow her breathing down and pull away from his blue-clad shoulder, which was damp with tears. “Sorry,” she said, blushing.   
  
McCoy shook his head in dismissal, smiling at her with those soft eyes again. “Happens to everyone. It’s normal.” He rubbed her back in slow circles and leaned his forehead against hers. “Even Jim cries after away missions sometimes.”   
  
“Really?”   
  
“Really. Then he goes’n gets drunk on Romulan ale, but I don’t think you’re gonna go and do that.” Warm fingers brushed a strand of hair out of her face. With McCoy’s face only a few inches away from hers, it was getting harder for Nyota to think clearly. She could see the green in the irises more clearly from here. “Feelin’ a little better?”   
  
“Yes, actually.” Physically, no; her head and chest hurt even more from crying, but mentally, yes. She sniffled and dabbed at her wet cheeks with one hand. The stereotype that some people looked good after crying, in her opinion, was a lot of bullshit. No one did, except maybe Gaila, but then again, she _always_ looked good.   
  
“Here, Nyota.” McCoy took her hand in his and replaced it with a handkerchief, gently wiping her eyes and cheeks himself. Gone was his usual attitude; if she hadn’t just been part of the extenuating circumstances, Nyota would have thought he had been stolen and replaced by an android, or a clone, or something, whose face was all attentive tenderness.   
  
“I…you don’t have to do that,” she managed, voice mortifyingly high.   
  
“I want to.” He pressed the soft, folded cloth against her cheek one last time, then unfolded it and handed it to her. “Blow your nose, darlin’.” Nyota’s cheeks flamed even hotter, but she obeyed.   
  
“You must think I’m such a child,” she said when she’d finished.   
  
“No.” McCoy shook his head. “You’re too much of a woman for that.” And then, of all the wonders, he leaned forward and lightly kissed her forehead. His lips were warm and soft, and she found her eyes closing at the pleasure of the contact. “But just enough for that,” he said when he broke away.   
  
Nyota smiled at him. “I’m glad I’m not a child, then,” she told him, and, tilting her head, pressed her lips against his.   
  
She’d half-expected him to pull back or push her away, but instead, he rumbled a low, pleased _mmm_ and cupped her face in his hands. His full lips parted slightly; Nyota took the opportunity to trace her tongue against them, eliciting a shudder from McCoy and an inner chuckle from her. Doctor or not, he wasn’t the only one who could manipulate physical responses.   
  
“Wait, wait. Hold up.” In comparison with McCoy’s mouth, the sickbay air against her face was horribly cold (now she knew how Spock felt, it seemed). His hands were still on her face, holding on as though he thought she would run off, but his eyes were looking into hers, full of unanswered questions. “This isn’t…Nyota…” His gaze flicked away for a second before returning. “This is something you _want_ , right? I mean, it’s not just the hyposprays from earlier.”   
  
Nyota was confused for a second (when had he given her hyposprays?), but it resolved (right, it must have been when she was asleep), leaving her mind clear to answer. “It is,” she said, quiet but determined.   
  
“Oh.” The tension around McCoy’s eyes and the corners of his mouth abruptly dropped. “For me, too. It’s something I want, I mean.” One eyebrow went up. “What is ‘it’, anyway? A relationship or something?” The word _relationship_ came almost shyly from his mouth. “’Cause if it is, Jim’s gonna find out, and he’ll never let you hear the end of it.”   
  
“ _Me?_ Doctor, _you’re_ his best friend.”   
  
“Yeah, but I know how to work a hypo and he doesn’t. That’ll take care of most of the ribbin’.” He stroked her cheekbone with the pad of one thumb. Nyota felt something inside her chest melt a little, and it wasn’t congestion. “Look, if we’re friends or anythin’ else, call me by my name.”   
  
“Maybe, Leonard,” she said. There was no need to say aloud to which statement she was responding; by the light in his eyes, she could tell he knew as well as she did. “We’ll have to see what happens.”   
  
McCoy nodded and kissed her forehead again. “Well, for now, you still want that hypo? Your head’s probably gonna be hurtin’ like a bitch after the endorphins wear off.”   
  
“I think I’ll take you up on that,” Nyota replied, and turned her head to cover a yawn with her shoulder. “Hm. That’s strange. Shouldn’t I be wide awake?”   
  
“Actually, no.” He shook his head. “Not with the healin’ your body’s still goin’ through. You wanna get some more sleep, darlin’?”   
  
Now her whole _chest_ was warm and liquidy. “Would you mind calling me that again?”   
  
Expressive Eyebrow #1 went up again, this time in what looked like amusement. “Just lie on back, darlin’, and I’ll get your meds.” He pushed the same button on the side of the biobed that Christine had pushed earlier, and Nyota lay back as it reclined.   
  
She only meant to close her eyes for a second, to get her bearings before McCoy came back. But the cubicle created by the privacy curtain was so snug (at least it seemed so, in her compromised state) that by the time he came back to inject her, she was already on her way to a better and more healing sleep than the one in which she’d begun.


	4. Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyota starts to feel better.

When she woke up this time, Nyota’s head was far clearer, and less painful, than it had been the last time. There was also someone sitting on her feet. “Who’s there?” Her voice was a little clogged; she cleared her throat and repeated the question.   
  
“It’s me.” Oh, god… _Kirk?_ Nyota maneuvered herself up on her elbows into a sitting position with some difficulty, considering the biobed was lying flat. Kirk was indeed on her feet, grinning at her. And, standing next to him with his arms folded behind his back, was Spock. “How’re you doing, Uhura?”   
  
“Fine,” she said. “What are you doing here?” All right, so it was a little blunt, but this wasn’t exactly something that had happened before.   
  
“The captain and I wished to assess your condition,” Spock replied. His face was as still as usual, only slightly shaded with relief in the set of his eyebrows. Probably meant there was nothing to worry about…good. Nyota hoped she wouldn’t have to stay in here much longer.   
  
“That was nice of you,” she said, smiling at them both. Were they supposed to be on shift right now? Maybe. She didn’t know what time it was. “Are _you_ all right, Kirk? Doctor McCoy said you’d been hurt, too.” He’d used her last name instead of her rank; she could probably do the same without getting reprimanded. Saying ‘Leonard’ around them, though, would probably earn her at least three weeks’ worth of teasing. On Kirk’s end, to be more specific.   
  
“Nah, I’m fine.” Kirk shook his head and made a dismissive _tch_ noise, flipping a hand. “A few scrapes and bruises. Bones probably blew it out of proportion.”   
  
“He just said you ‘skedaddled’, to quote him directly.” Nothing wrong with a little friendly reminder.   
  
“Son of a bitch!” Kirk scowled and slammed his hand down on the hard edge of the biobed. “ _Ow._ ”   
  
“Captain, have you injured yourself?” Spock was quick to bend down, examining Kirk’s hand as though it was one of his best science experiments.   
  
“It’s _Jim_.” Kirk’s pout made him look so much like her cousin Kamaria when she didn’t get her way, petulantly immature, that Nyota had to laugh. “ _What?_ I’m funny all of a sudden?” From anyone else, those would have been fighting words, but his sunny smirk changed it to a bit of banter with the flick of an eyebrow. In his own way, she realized, he was as quietly expressive as Spock was.   
  
“No,” she said, returning to the moment. “You’re just you.”   
  
“And _you_ ,” Kirk pointed a finger at her, “are getting a commendation for saving Sulu’s ass on the away mission, definitely. And for being a fucking awesome liaison during a delicate situation with the delegation’s government.” He shook his head. “Sulu wanted to send you a flower, but I talked him out of it.” He stood up, _finally_ ; her feet were starting to get numb.   
  
Nyota blinked at him – was he joking? “Why?”   
  
“The flower in question is venomous,” Spock said.   
  
Oh. Probably a good thing Kirk had stopped its delivery, then. She wouldn’t have cared to be bitten to death in her sleep. “Thanks for _not_ letting him send it,” she said, laughing a little. She tucked some hair behind her ear and winced at how greasy it felt. “Sorry I’m not very presentable.”   
  
“You have a _cracked skull_ , Uhura. You’re not supposed to be presentable.”   
  
“So what’s _your_ excuse?” Nyota quipped. Jokingly, of course, because presentable or not, Kirk still looked good; she had to admit that. It wasn’t very often that you saw eyes like that outside of pornos (oh, the irony, but he’d conducted himself well on the ship thus far).   
  
“Oh, that’s just hilarious.” Kirk rolled his eyes. “Good shot.”   
  
“So have I missed anything important on the bridge?” she asked, glancing at both Kirk and Spock as she did so. Both would probably know the particulars.   
  
“Nothing much. Just Komack hailing us and bitching us out for ‘turning an away mission into a bloodbath’, quote-unquote.” He made his fingers into air quotes. “The guy’s a douchebag.”   
  
“ _Jim_ ,” Spock cut in sharply, “Admiral Komack’s abrasiveness does not bestow the right to insult him upon you. In addition, it is illogical to say he is a…a ‘douchebag’ when he is clearly a human male.”   
  
It was pretty funny how primly Spock stumbled over the word. “I’ve found that most human males are very literally douchebags,” she offered. “Water-based sacks designed to go inside the female genitalia.”   
  
Spock raised an eyebrow. “A most accurate observation, Nyota. Jim, are you well?”   
  
Kirk was unavailable to talk at the moment, being doubled over in silent laughter with his hands on his knees. His face was incredibly red; Nyota suddenly wished she had her PADD on her. If she could get a picture of that, it would be legendary.   
  
It was even more legendary when he fell over, rolling onto the sickbay floor with a thump.   
  
Spock, to put it colloquially, freaked. Someone who wasn’t well-versed in communications would have said he was only mildly concerned, but Nyota could see the emotion in how quickly he went to his knees. “Jim _ne ki’ne, du tok-ti ha?_ ” Flat tone, hardly expressive at all, but that word!  
  
He’d said _ne ki’ne_ …’shieldmate’. A warrior’s term, indicating the closest friendship. _Ne ki’nelar_ trusted each other with their lives. Nyota blinked, her state now what could be understated as ‘shocked speechless’; they were _close_ , yes. They talked, played chess, played music for each other…  
  
…had come into sickbay together.   
  
“I’m okay. I’m okay,” Kirk gasped out from the floor. “Oof.” His head appeared above the foot of Nyota’s biobed as he pulled himself to his feet, grinning like a maniac. With his mussed blond hair and pink face, he looked like a very well-decorated bottle of antacid. “That was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever heard you say, Uhura. _OW!_ ” He slid between Spock and the biobed, covering his face with one arm. “Help!”   
  
“And it’s the only fuckin’ thing you’ll hear, if you keep agitatin’ my patients!” McCoy’s arms were crossed; one hand held an empty hypospray. “What’re you thinkin’, idiot? You wanna pick up Suliban dysentery from that floor?”   
  
“Fuck, Bones! Didn’t mean you had to stick me in the neck!” Kirk stuck his lower lip out and rubbed the side of his neck with a wounded expression.   
  
“Oh, it’s a goddamn herpes booster. Don’t be such an infant.”   
  
“ _Herpes?_ ” Kirk put his hands on his hips and glared. “I’ll have you know that I haven’t slept with anyone in a month and a half.”   
  
Oh, now that was _way_ too much information. Nyota made a face, echoed by McCoy; Spock twitched a little. “Didn’t need to know that, Jim,” McCoy said. “ _Really_ didn’t need to know that. Aren’t y’all supposed to be on duty? You and the hobgoblin?”   
  
“Alpha shift ended thirty-two point five zero minutes ago, Doctor,” Spock answered. “Logically, J…the captain and I are not expected to remain on the bridge.”   
  
“Since when do you call him Jim? Thought that stick up your ass wouldn’t allow it.”   
  
“My rectum is clear of obstructions, Doctor.” There went Spock’s _I only put up with you because you know how to treat my injuries_ expression, the one that used _two_ eyebrows. “Jim requested that I call him by his forename. As we are not on duty, I found the request acceptable.”   
  
“Yeah?” McCoy looked from Kirk to Spock, then from them to Nyota. “All right, you given her the news about her commendation yet?”   
  
“First thing I said!”   
  
“In fact, Jim, your first words to Lieutenant Uhura were ‘It’s me’,” Spock corrected him. “You told her of her commendation forty-two point six seconds later.”   
  
“Hey, you know what? Shut it,” Kirk said, once again demonstrating the art of fake insults given with a smile. “Okay, Bones, I think we’ve bothered _Nyota_ enough.”   
  
“ _Nyota_ still hasn’t said _you_ can use her first name, Kirk.” If he insisted on pushing her buttons, she’d push his right back, slight friendship or not. “Thank you both for coming to see me.”   
  
Spock nodded at her. “It was logical that we speak with you.”   
  
“We wanted to see you,” Kirk said, and elbowed Spock lightly in the side. “Same sentiment, different words, right, Spock?”   
  
“May I remind you, _Captain_ , that I am capable of incapacitating you if you do not cease to touch me inappropriately?” Nyota knew he wasn’t really going to do it; he would have said so more explicitly if he was. Still, reminders of the nerve pinch were always a good thing.   
  
Kirk shuddered in response. “That’s kinky, Spock.”   
  
“It is not. A nerve pinch is not to be used lightly.”   
  
_Help me_ , Nyota mouthed in McCoy’s direction. Fighting and innuendoes were a disgusting combination at the best of times, and Kirk and Spock’s current exchange threatened to make her head hurt again.   
  
“All right, you two, _out_ ,” McCoy interrupted them loudly. “Now. And Jim, no sexual insinuations in the sickbay. That’s the rule.”   
  
“Doctor, your level of disrespect has reached heretofore unknown levels.”   
  
“Oh, come on.” McCoy rolled his eyes. “Jim’s a big boy. Tellin’ him the truth ain’t gonna kill him.”   
  
“I’m a _big_ boy all right,” Kirk piped up, licking his lips. “ _Really_ big.”   
  
“God _dammit_ , Jim!” McCoy slapped his shoulder. “I’m a doctor, not a porn director. How many times do I have to tell you, no hittin’ on people in sickbay?”   
  
“You never let me have _any_ fun,” Kirk said grumpily. “First no sexual insinuations, then no flirting? You suck.”   
  
“Damn straight. Now out. _Now_.” He clicked the hypospray a few times. Kirk shrieked (“Oh, come on! Man-scream. _Man-scream_ ,” he’d later say), latched onto Spock’s arm, and ran, dragging the Vulcan with him so quickly that Nyota wouldn’t have been surprised to hear his shoulder pop out of its socket.   
  
“Couple of nutcases,” McCoy observed as the sickbay door slid shut behind them. “No offense to you, but that hobgoblin is just a few sandwiches shy of a picnic.”   
  
“I have no comment on the matter.” To be honest, he _had_ been acting a little uncharacteristic just then. Nyota couldn’t get that _ne ki’ne_ out of her head. “Question, though.”   
  
“Shoot.”   
  
“When Kirk was here, you said he was talking about the away mission, right?”   
  
“Didn’t shut up about it.”   
  
“Did he talk about anything else? Any _one_ else, to be more specific?” _Too oblique, dammit_ , she thought; she was going for information, not subtlety.   
  
McCoy blinked. “What are you drivin’ at?”   
  
All right, time to be blunt. “Kirk.” Nyota held up a hand. “Spock.” She held up the other hand. “Are they interested in each other?” The tips of her index fingers touched each other, an imitation of some kind of kiss; Human or Vulcan, she didn’t know.   
  
He paused, seemingly considering his answer, and nodded. “Yeah, I think they are.”   
  
Nyota couldn’t say she was surprised, or upset, even, although some part of her brain was yelling _It’s Kirk! Spock and Captain Annoying are interested in each other! Isn’t there something WRONG with that?_ “How do you know?”   
  
“I know Jim. When he starts talkin’ ‘bout someone ‘til my ears want to drop off, and playin’ _chess_ with them, it usually means he’s head over heels.” McCoy sat down on the end of the biobed, fingers playing with the edge of the blanket. “You heard what he said. They haven’t slept together, either. Means he _respects_ that hobgoblin.”   
  
“And you know he was telling the truth…how?”   
  
“He knows I could’ve scanned him for hormone changes. Why would he lie?” McCoy said, and shrugged. “Are you pissed at Jim?” he asked.   
  
“No, I’m not.” Spock had never been secretive about the fact that he was attracted to men and women; he tended to be monogamous, and his relationship with Nyota had been his first (barring his far-off bonding to T’Pring, now several months dead), but he had proven himself truthful even on sexual subjects. “I’m worried that Kirk will treat him like shit, but I’m not angry.”   
  
“Thought I told you once. Jim ain’t crude in relationships.” He touched her hand. “You don’t need to worry.”   
  
_Likes follow-up calls and holdin’ doors and sendin’ flowers. Shit like that._ McCoy’s voice, in her memory, was as clear as though he were speaking to her right now. “I remember that,” Nyota said. She could feel her face relax in relief. Maybe Kirk wasn’t a conventional partner, but neither was Spock, if she wanted to be honest with herself.   
  
“Nothin’ to worry about. Jim knows I’ll slap the tar outta him if he doesn’t behave.” He held his tricorder up and slowly ran it up and down Nyota’s body, the machinery beeping as he did so. “Good. Your head’s about back to normal. Lemme just check here, hold on.” He glanced at the biobed readings, nodded, and turned to her. “You shouldn’t be back on the bridge for at least another forty-eight hours, but you’ll be clear to get off this thing soon.”   
  
“Thank _goodness_.” She’d probably go nuts if she had to endure another ‘well-meaning’ visit from Captain Flirtyshorts. At least in her own quarters, she’d be able to ignore it if he knocked on the door. “It’ll be nice to get into clean clothes. I feel disgusting.” She’d take a sonic shower, too; oh, the joys of being a lieutenant. No water showers in her own quarters.   
  
“You want to take a bath?” McCoy said. His ears were red for some reason. “There’s a tub in my quarters. You can use that if you want to.”   
  
Nyota’s first instinct was _oh my god, yes_ ; she hadn’t had a bath since the ship had left Earth. For twenty-four years, save for her time at the Academy, she’d been able to sink up to her nose in water and bubbles whenever she wanted to; here, she was relegated to that sonic buzz. Her second instinct was _wait, HIS quarters?_ “Wait. A bath in your quarters? That’s a little…intrusive of me.” She had to stop herself from saying _inappropriate_ ; who was to say it had to be?   
  
“You’d have the bathroom to yourself,” he said quickly. “Not like I’d be in there with you, ‘less you needed help with somethin’.” He cleared his throat, his cheeks as red as his ears. “It doesn’t…I mean, I wouldn’t go hittin’ on you or bein’ improper.”   
  
The desire for a bath was slowly tipping Nyota’s mental scales. Truth be told, McCoy had never given her any reason to distrust him. If he said he wouldn’t look, then why _shouldn’t_ she take advantage of a friend’s offer and use his bathtub? A tiny part of her wished that he hadn’t made the ‘improper’ comment; it precluded the option of intimacy in the… _all right, Nyota, enough_ , she thought, mentally cutting herself off. “All right,” she said, a slight smile quirking up her mouth. “That sounds good.”   
  
“Yeah? All right.” The tense stance to his shoulders relaxed a little as he turned and entered something into the biobed display, which beeped and went blank. “Medical clearance. My quarters are right off sickbay, so it ain’t gonna be much of a walk.” He stood up and held out a hand to her. “C’mon. You’ll need some help gettin’ over there.”   
  
“I’m fairly sure I can walk by myself,” Nyota said, peeling back the blanket. When she stood up, though, the cramped muscles made her legs wobble. “All right, so maybe I do need a little help.”   
  
McCoy’s eyes were crinkled in approval as he nodded and placed a steadying hand on the small of her back. “Sensible. Jim always says he doesn’t need a damn babysitter, then ends up fallin’ flat on his face.” Well, she wouldn’t have expected anything else, exaggeration or not; she suspected this was the former.   
  
No one stopped them or even questioned them as they made their way through sickbay, his hand on her back and hers on his shoulder; Nyota would have thought that McCoy would be asked where he was taking her. Even when they passed by Dr. M’Benga, he just glanced up from the yeoman whose nosebleed he was stanching, and nodded. “Are you needed in here?” she said. “What if someone comes in with a serious problem?”   
  
“I’m off-shift,” he answered. “I was just in here monitorin’ you. M’Benga’s the main physician assigned to beta shift.” That made sense. And the medical clearance would probably show up in her file, too, she realized, so there wouldn’t be any problems with her leaving sickbay to begin with.   
  
“This is it,” he said, stopping in front of a door in the back. Nyota had never noticed it before, but then again, she wasn’t in here all that much. McCoy keyed in his access code and the doors slid open, revealing his quarters as they entered. “Home sweet home, sorta. Home on the tin can.”   
  
They were larger than hers, logically (and there went her mental Spock-voice again), but plainer, lacking the decorations she had used in her quarters. His bed was covered in a dark blue comforter, which looked very soft; fleetingly, she wondered what it would be like to lie on it. “Very nice,” she said, then added teasingly, “for a tin can, I suppose.”   
  
“Smartass.” He smirked at her, but it wasn’t at all like the Kirk-smirk in that he didn’t seem to be really mocking her. The McCoy-smirk was far more affectionate, and Nyota decided that she liked it. “The bathroom’s just here.” He went over to a door on the other side of the room and slid it open. “There’s soap and all on a shelf, and you can borrow my robe.”   
  
Right. Nyota looked down at her legs; the sickbay gown ended halfway to her knees. She couldn’t exactly go gallivanting around McCoy’s quarters in it after she’d taken a bath, not if she didn’t want him to think of wet T-shirt contests. It was barely decent _dry_. “Thank you,” she told him, then paused; what exactly could you say if a new romantic interest offered you a bath when you were freshly injured? “You’ll…ah, be waiting here?”   
  
“Yeah. You need help, just holler or somethin’.” He waved his PADD, evidence of usefulness even outside of sickbay. “I have some incident reports to fill out.”   
  
“Ours, I presume,” she said, smiling.   
  
“Right,” McCoy said. “Yours was the easiest to fill out, actually. Jim kept tryin’ to hack the database and make his say ‘injured bravely and hotly, with gleamin’ pectorals, in the line of duty.’ Or some shit like that.”   
  
Pectorals? “I don’t remember his shirt ripping,” Nyota said. To be fair, she’d been half-conscious at the time, but there was a very noticeable difference between gold shirt and pink skin.   
  
“It didn’t.” He rolled his eyes. “Jim thinks a lot of himself, so I guess he wants everyone to think so, too.”   
  
Weirdly enough, that didn’t bother Nyota quite as much as it should have. Maybe because she was standing in McCoy’s _bedroom_ , with nothing more than a thin gown and a few feet of air between them. “I’ll just go take that bath now,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the bathroom. “I don’t _think_ I’ll need help with anything, but…”  
  
“Better to have it and not need it, I know, I know,” McCoy nodded. “A’right. The controls are pretty simple to work, so you shouldn’t have any trouble. Use my soap if you want to, but stay away from the shavin’ cream. It’s Jim’s.”   
  
“He shaves here?”   
  
“No. He just left it here on our last poker night.”   
  
“What on earth would shaving cream have to do with poker night?” Nyota asked. She’d heard some stupid drinking stories before, namely the time Scotty had too much whiskey at the age of twenty-five and streaked around the Starfleet campus, but shaving cream had never come into the equation.   
  
“He wanted to play a prank on Spock. Just…just don’t…oh, forget it.” Red had long been bypassed; McCoy’s face was _purple_. Nyota idly wondered what it would take to make him cycle through the whole color spectrum; would a prank in _his_ sickbay make his face turn as green as Spock’s on a bad day? She shook her head; either she was bored silly or the cracked skull had done things to her brain.   
  
“All right, I won’t mention anything,” she said. “Thanks again. I shouldn’t take very long.” Closing the bathroom doors behind her as she went in, she slipped off the gown and closed her eyes in unrealized pleasure at the cool air on her skin. She’d been lying down in her own sweat for what, a day and a half? Two days? She frowned at herself in the mirror, working the ponytail holder out of her hair while she tried to calculate the shift rotations she’d missed. She doubted there was any need to worry; if anything had needed her attention, Kirk probably would have told her.   
  
McCoy’s bathroom was a bit larger than hers, making room for the bathtub along one wall. Nyota made a face at the can of shaving cream that did indeed rest on a shelf above the faucet, along with shampoo and a bar of soap. But Kirk wasn’t here, and her attention turned to the controls set in the wall as she punched in heat specifications. One good thing about modern conveniences: tubs filled up quickly. She didn’t know how her mother had managed with ‘slow taps and a lot of patience’, as she’d been reminded for twenty-four years.   
  
Within a few minutes, the tub was full and emitting steam that washed over Nyota’s skin; she could almost feel her pores opening and relaxing in the vapor, and smiled at how good it felt. Carefully, slowly, she slid down into the tub, pleasurable shivers running up and down her limbs at the contrast between the cool bathroom and the hot water. “Mmm,” she said aloud. “That’s nice.” Her hair floated around her head, soft and weightless.   
  
When she sat up, though, the heavy weight of her now-wet hair sharply reminded her that she’d sustained a head injury. “ _Ow!_ ” She drew in a breath through gritted teeth; her hair was pulling painfully at her sore scalp. “ _Kinyeshi_.”   
  
And then, as though to add insult to injury (literally), the door opened. “Nyota, you all right?” McCoy burst into the bathroom, eyes wide; what did he expect, that she’d been disemboweled? Automatically, Nyota drew her knees up so that she was at least covered, if not decent; her face flamed with embarrassment. “I heard you yellin’. What hurts?”   
  
“My head’s sore, and my hair was pulling on it.” She bent her neck to demonstrate, wincing as a crick in the vertebrae popped. “I was just surprised.”   
  
“People don’t usually go ‘ow’ when they’re just _surprised_.” McCoy crossed his arms; one eyebrow was way up in the ‘no bullshit’ expression she’d come to recognize. “I can probably fix that, y’know.”  
  
Nyota shook her head, which was still resting on her knees. “I’m still in possession of full mental capacity. I can wash my own hair.”   
  
“I know that.” His voice was suddenly lower, rougher… _appealing_. “Question is, do you _want_ to?”   
  
_Oh_. An offer, then, if she wanted it to be one.   
  
The liquid heat she’d felt when he was sympathetic was back…only this time, it was lower than her chest. Even in the hot water, Nyota could feel herself getting wet. “No,” she said. One corner of her mouth rose in a half-smile – the one, she realized suddenly, that she’d last used six months ago. “I don’t think I do.”   
  
“Turn around, then.”   
  
“Why?” What did he mean to do?   
  
“So I can wash your hair, that’s why.” That made sense. Nyota turned around as he asked, her back to him, as she heard him kneel down by the edge of the tub and pop open a bottle. “Been a while since I’ve done this.”   
  
Something hot flashed through her. “For whom?” she asked, and raised her eyebrows, even knowing that he couldn’t see her face.   
  
He chuckled; she felt and heard it, vibrations traveling from his hands working through her hair. Where had he learned to do that? It felt good enough to raise chill bumps on her arms. “For my ex-wife, Nyota. Havin’ Joanna was hard on her, so I helped her out some.”   
  
Oh. That made it a little easier to think about; they’d _divorced_ , after all. Clearly not because of this; he was too good with his hands. Nyota shivered in pleasure as his fingers gently scratched her scalp. “That makes sense.”   
  
There was a smile in McCoy’s voice when he spoke again; she’d come to recognize the warm undertone. “You like that?”   
  
“Yes.” Had the steam from the tub always enveloped her like this, or was it a new development? Either way, it was comfortable. “Do all doctors have magical hands like this?”   
  
“Magical hands? Haven’t heard that one, darlin’.” His lips pressed against her shoulder, shockingly cool against her heated skin. “Mm. You want to dunk your head under?”   
  
“Will you still respect me when I come back up?” Nyota teased. All banter aside, she did wonder what his reaction would be to seeing her completely naked – disappointment? He _had_ said that she was underweight. She hugged her knees a little tighter.   
  
“Sure. Does that mean you don’t want me lookin’?” McCoy asked. “I’ll warn you, I don’t have that hobgoblin control. You’re gorgeous, and…”   
  
That low rumble was going to crack _her_ control. Craning her neck around, Nyota smiled at him through the drape of her hair. His cheeks were flushed again, although that could have just been the heat, and if he wanted to talk gorgeous…those _eyes_. The way he was looking at her probably could have turned _Spock_ to jelly.   
  
“Let’s see what happens,” she said, and leaned back, stretching, to rinse her hair underwater. Was it teasing, or simply nerves, that made her stay under longer than she usually did (or was necessary)? Either way, her stomach was full of little butterflies, flying around and flapping heat to places that she suddenly longed to touch.   
  
_Or to have someone else touch_ , she thought as she came back up; nerves _and_ anticipation, she realized as she took in McCoy’s parted lips and wide eyes. He swallowed hard. “You want this? Me?”  
  
Nyota had the feeling that there was no going back, whatever she said...and that was fine with her. “Yes.”   
  
One moment, the words were just leaving her lips; the next, they were swallowed by McCoy’s mouth on hers, and this time, he was anything but gentle. “ _Nyota_.” Her name was hot and sweet against her lips, murmured as he kissed her again and again. Lightning, as sudden and crackling as the storm in space, sparked through her, sensitizing her, with every touch; she wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulders, fingers running through his hair, to pull him closer to her. Some part of her brain that _wasn’t_ consumed by hormones warned her that she was getting his shirt wet, but that part could fuck off.   
  
Unfortunately, she couldn’t ignore the fact that their position meant her rib cage was being pressed up against the side of the tub, and it wasn’t exactly comfortable. “Leonard,” she finally said, after what could have been ten seconds or maybe five minutes, pulling away from him with a great deal of regret (and difficulty). “I’m being squished.”   
  
McCoy’s lips were flushed and swollen from kissing; Nyota couldn’t help admiring them. “Sorry,” he said. “You want to get out?” She answered his question by standing up, slowly and carefully, as it wouldn’t do to fall and knock her head again. “Oh. Okay, hold on and lemme get a towel.” Standing up from his kneeling position on the floor, the doctor cast around and unhooked a towel from the rack on the wall before spreading it out between his hands in invitation.  
  
From this vantage point, Nyota could easily tell how aroused he was. The bulge in his standard-issue black pants reminded her forcibly of her fantasy, and she swallowed hard.   
  
“Thank you.” Her voice was a little unsteady as she stepped out of the tub and let him wrap her in the towel, her back fitting against his front. Her heart thumped hard in her chest at the feeling of his erection against her back, growing firmer as he dried her. Who would have thought? Doctor McCoy, merciless administrator of hyposprays, could get a hard-on…for her. And he could also have hands that were both gentle and torturous when they rubbed a towel across her breasts and her thighs.   
  
“Shit, you’re beautiful,” McCoy murmured in her ear, lifting the towel to gently rub her hair. “Feel how much you’re turnin’ me on?” His breath was warm against the sensitive skin, making her shiver with more than the simple temperature contrast. Could she come simply by hearing him whisper things in that accent, feeling him touch her? Half of her wanted to find out, but the other (and far more sensible, if that could apply to sex) half wanted her brain to shut up and go with the flow.   
  
Well, Nyota hadn’t become Communications Officer by ignoring her instincts. “What do you think about moving this to the bed?”   
  
She could feel the shudder move all the way down his body, arousing him even more. “Think it’s a fuckin’ amazing idea,” he said, kissing the crook of her neck. “You feelin’ up to it?” Of course he would ask that; even in the midst of arousal, apparently, the doctor was the doctor. It should have been a turn-off, this questioning, but for some reason, it wasn’t.   
  
“I’m definitely feeling up to it.” _Up to it_ was the most tactful description of what was going on; just hearing his voice had made her wet.  
  
What surprised her, though, was McCoy letting the towel drop to the floor and picking her up, carrying her the ten or so steps from the bathroom to his bed. “What are you _doing?_ ” The question was muffled in his neck (and he smelled _so_ good; why hadn’t she noticed it before?), but some of the indignant tone must have carried through. McCoy was grinning as he set her carefully down against the pillows.   
  
“What d’ya _think_ I’m doin’?” Nyota had never heard his accent drawled out quite that thick before, and she pressed her legs together hearing it now. If _this_ was his sex voice, Jocelyn had to be either deaf or stupid to have divorced him. “Y’really need me to spell it out?”   
  
“No,” she answered. Her own voice, she realized, had gone low. “I need you to fuck me.”   
  
One moment, McCoy was standing over her; the next, he was on top of her, mouth melded to hers, stretched full-length over the length of her damp body. He wasn’t crushing her; Nyota took half a second to appreciate him resting his weight on the bed rather than on her before fervently returning his kisses. His lips were so soft, in contrast to the hard pressure of his mouth, and she arched up at the sensation; her breasts rubbed against his uniform shirt as she did, and how had she ever thought the shirts were smooth when they were rough enough to tease her nipples hard? “ _Leonard_.” His name came out of her mouth almost of its own accord.   
  
“Mm?” One firm thigh pressed between her legs; there was probably a wet spot on his pants from her arousal, but judging by his reaction, he didn’t mind. “Good _God_ , Nyota.” His lips moved from her mouth to her neck, sucking at first gently, then a little harder when she squirmed against his thigh. “You’re soaked for me,” he whispered against the skin.   
  
As though he needed to state the obvious. “One of us,” she replied between moaning gasps – if she had a talented tongue, then Leonard McCoy had talented lips – “is overdressed.”   
  
“It ain’t you, darlin’.” His thigh rubbed slowly against her, tearing a whimper from her clenched mouth. In spite of the room’s standard temperature, waves of heat were breaking all over her, fanning out from his leg between hers and his erection pushed against her hip, hot even through the material of his pants. “You wanna wait…” his breath hitched as her hips bucked up “…’til I get my clothes off?”   
  
He must have realized how close she was to coming, even after only…a few minutes? A second? Nyota could have come right then, despite the lack of nakedness on his part, but she wanted to see _him_ naked first. Just the thought of him… _god_. “Get undressed,” she said, eyes squeezed shut. If she saw him, it might make her rethink.   
  
“A’right.” She couldn’t see him, but she could _hear_ him getting undressed: the soft swish of his shirts being removed, the thump of boots onto the floor, the metallic sound of his zipper being undone. She shivered, her ears straining; that barely-audible friction of cloth on skin…he was taking his underwear off.   
  
“Are you undressed?” Her voice was abnormally loud in her ears, compared to the quiet of his clothing.   
  
“Yeah. Open your eyes, sweetheart.”   
  
When she did, it felt like she’d never want to close them again. Even when she’d fantasized that one night, she hadn’t thought he would be so _beautiful_. His chest was broad, but lean and defined, lightly dusted with brown hair that led downward, coalescing into a patch of coarse curls at his crotch. “Fuck, Leonard,” she whispered. He was fully hard, his cock straining and tipped with dampness. _Jamii_ , but she wanted him _inside_ her. “Don’t tease me.”   
  
“Goddammit, Nyota, I’m a doctor, not a porn actor.” Had it not been for the look in his eyes, longing as she’d rarely seen it, the words would have been a turn-off. They were, instead, a plea; did she accept him? Expressive. Sad, almost; why wouldn’t he be, after so many were lost to him in so many ways?   
  
Nyota could fix part of that.   
  
“Come here,” she said softly, smiling. “I want you.”   
  
McCoy’s shoulders straightened, even as his eyes and mouth relaxed. “Feelin’s mutual.” He stretched out on the bed next to her (those _legs_ ), cupping her chin in one hand to look into her eyes. “I know you’re protected,” he said. “So’m I.”   
  
“Good.” One less thing to worry about, but this was definitely not the right time to be a doctor. “ _Leonard_. Stop fucking _teasing_.” This time, she was the one to initiate the kiss, her lips finding - _claiming_ \- his. He groaned and wrapped his arms around her back. His hands rested under her shoulder blades, firm and secure, positioning her on top of him.   
  
Nyota could feel her still-damp hair clinging wetly to her back; McCoy’s was mussed, a perfect complement to his bright eyes and heavy breathing. “Ready?” She nodded, and he canted his hips upward, sliding easily inside her.   
  
Her head reared back involuntarily as her eyes closed and her lips parted in a silent gasp. It had been too long, and he felt so _good_ inside her, even better when his hips thrust up again, filling her completely for a wonderful moment. “Nyota, ah, _fuck_ ,” he groaned as his hands came up to cup her face again, all the better to shower kisses on her mouth and nose and cheeks and forehead.   
  
“Don’t stop!” she gritted out, or _ri pehka’uh_ in the language of her former lover, or _wala kuacha_ in the language she knew best, even now. But the name she said when his hips pumped faster and his fingers came down to stroke her clit defied translation: _Leonard, Leonard, Leonard_. She could feel herself swelling, pushing against his hand.   
  
So much heat was pouring into her, pressure building until she couldn’t stand it another millisecond longer. The pad of his thumb pressed down, rubbing hard, as he thrust into her again, and she cried out; her hips snapped down against his and pleasure radiated out from where he touched her. _Seismic waves_ , she thought haphazardly as she pulsed around him. Words in some language – she wasn’t sure which it was, only that they were intense and suited the moment – poured from her, drawing out answering groans from the man under her.   
  
“J- _Jesus_ ,” she heard McCoy gasp as she slowly regained her head. He was a complete mess, red-faced and bright-eyed with sex…and still hard inside her, Nyota realized when his erection twitched with the movement of his hips. She tightened around it, still so sensitive from the first orgasm; it felt like a few more hard thrusts would set her off again. “ _Shit_ , I…”  
  
 _Come **on**_ , she thought, or maybe said, and pushed down against him; they were both _so_ close, only a few more seconds…  
  
“ _Fuck!_ Nyota!” His voice rose and broke when he came, arching up, both of their bodies slick with sweat. That sudden warmth, almost searing as he released inside her, was enough to trigger another climax, stronger; electric where the first one had been a quake. Heat shot up her spine in bursts that went on and on, taking her so high she thought she would explode from the pleasure.   
  
The descent was slower than the climb to that peak. Nyota rested her head in McCoy’s neck, breathing deeply. It was sweaty, but it wasn’t as though she cared; she was suddenly so tired. Why was she tired? “Leonard?” she mumbled.   
  
“Yeah, darlin’?” She felt one hand stroke her hair, even gentler than he’d been when he washed it. “Okay?”   
  
She translated that as Post-Coitus for ‘are you all right?’ “Mm-hm.” Even after that sex, he still smelled good – not like any sort of cologne, just soap and musk and sweat. “Tired.”   
  
“Shit. I’m sorry.” There was a palpable difference between his normal voice and his doctor-mode voice; right now, it was the latter. His arms tightened around her, a comforting hold. “Shouldn’t’ve…”  
  
“Should’ve,” Nyota interrupted him. “We wanted to.” She nuzzled his neck, yawning…mmm, she needed to have good sex like this more often, if _this_ was the kind of energy drain it left. Pleasant. Her lower half was still humming.   
  
“You want to rest, sweetheart?” His hand rubbed a light circle on her back.   
  
“Mm-hm.” Sleep sounded so good.   
  
“A’right. Just lemme get us cleaned up.” He slowly pulled out of her, as though it took more energy than he had right at that moment, then sat up and swung his legs down over the side of the bed with a grunt. From her vantage point, Nyota had quite a good view of his backside - _very_ nice.   
  
Her eyes closed, only opening at the feel of a warm, damp washcloth gently wiping her clean. “Hey.” She looked down the length of her body to where he knelt at the foot of the bed, still completely naked; even spent, she shivered.   
  
“Hey,” McCoy answered, smiling at her. Each pass of the cloth was careful, as though he knew just where she was sensitive. “You’re feelin’ all right? Nothin’ hurts?”   
  
“No.” She stretched out; nothing ached or twinged, a weird but welcome change after the injuries of the away mission. “I feel fine.”   
  
“Good. Glad I didn’t break anything.” He reached over to set the cloth on the bedside table (it would undoubtedly congeal into something disgusting, but who cared if it was just them?) and kissed her, long and tender, before peeling back the rumpled comforter. “Go on and rest.”   
  
“Stay with me?” Nyota asked, even as she slid under the covers. Cool sheets against her hot skin…heaven. Another item on the list of things to do more often: sleep naked. Preferably with someone else.   
  
“’Course.” She heard the sheets rustle as he got in the other side of the bed, pulling her close into a spooning position. A sigh rumbled through his chest and her back. “Guess you do feel better.”   
  
Between the soft bed and McCoy, it felt as though she might melt into a contented puddle then and there. His legs and back were strong and firm, while his chin rested in the notch of her shoulder. “I guess I do.”   
  
“Mmm.” He nuzzled his nose against her ear. “Don’t need to get hurt to do this again.”   
  
Nyota smiled against the pillow, eyes closing. “Leonard?”   
  
“Huh?”   
  
“I didn’t need to borrow your bathrobe.”   
  
McCoy’s chuckle vibrated against her neck and back. “Good. It’s fuckin’ ugly, anyway.”   
  
She drifted off to warmth, physical and emotional both. Either way, it felt good.


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get back to normal - for the Enterprise, that is.

Blue.   
  
Her sheets weren’t blue. Where was she?   
  
_Right_. McCoy’s quarters, but she couldn’t blame herself for thinking she was in her own. Even when she’d slept in Spock’s bed, the two times he’d let her stay over, she’d had a hard time actually getting to sleep. “Leonard?” Nyota murmured into the pillow, yawning.   
  
“Mm…yeah?” His arm, secure around her waist, tightened a little, as though he wasn’t sure if she was there. She’d thought the same thing more than once. “Hey, darlin’. Sleep well?”   
  
“Really well.” She rolled over in his embrace, turning so that they faced each other. Just out of sleep, McCoy’s face was relaxed and warm, that easy smile on his lips so much more pleasant than the scowl or smirk he tended to wear at other times. “How about you?”   
  
“Damn good. Better than usual.” He nuzzled the tip of his nose against the sleep- and sex-sweaty skin of her neck, which felt even better than it had earlier. Or was it last night? “No headache or anythin’?”   
  
Nyota experimentally shook her head from side to side, then shook it again in reply. “No. I feel fine.” Operations track or no, she’d studied enough biology to know what a good sex-adrenaline rush could do to a person. “What time is it?”   
  
“Jus’ a second, sweetheart.” He shifted a little. “Computer, gimme the time?”   
  
“It is 0520, standard time,” the computer’s voice answered. Even after these few months, Nyota still wasn’t used to that sound; it was too mechanical to sound human, and too human to sound like a computer. _Like a female Vulcan_ , she thought, smiling; the weirdest thoughts tended to run through her head when she was sleepy.   
  
“Ah, _shit_ ,” McCoy groaned. “Two’n a half fuckin’ hours ‘til my shift.”   
  
Damn. That probably meant a long, boring rest in her own quarters until she could go back on duty; it probably wouldn’t be until the next day, at least. The medical staff here could be overly cautious sometimes. “Did you want to do something until then?” she said.   
  
His smile widened, growing wicked as it spread. “Somethin’ in mind?”   
  
She hadn’t really thought of anything in particular, but now that he mentioned it, yes, she _did_. “Round two?”   
  
“Just what I was thinkin’. Lights to twenty-five percent.” McCoy peeled the covers aside, one eyebrow quirked as he looked her over; either he had heat vision, or she was still horny from last night. Considering the recent dearth of transporter malfunctions, Nyota was inclined to believe that the heat rolling over her skin was the latter. “Want me to help you out?”   
  
“What do you mean?” She had a fair idea of what he meant, but precision was always important.   
  
The eyebrow went up a little higher. “This.” He moved to half-cover her body with his, head over her torso, and… _oh_. ‘This’ turned out to be his mouth on one nipple while his fingers worked the other one, flicking and sucking, then alternating until Nyota’s eyes were closed and her back was arching again. Leonard McCoy was no linguist, but he _definitely_ had a talented tongue.   
  
She couldn’t resist saying as much. “You have a…a talented tongue.” Her breath hitched when he sucked one nipple between passes of said tongue. “ _Fuck_.”   
  
His chuckle was a rumbling purr against the skin of her stomach as he went lower. “Takes a lot of work, y’know.”   
  
The irritation Nyota felt at the thought of him doing this to another woman was strong, but brief; one couldn’t exactly stay angry when one was being tongued by a determined doctor on a mission. His nose pressed against her clit, rubbing hard, while his tongue – was he rolling it into a _cylinder?_ She couldn’t do that – poked and licked and dragged against her, so hot even compared to her own heat. “ _Guhh,_ ” she squeaked, command of _any_ language completely gone.   
  
He hummed something in response; the vibrations would have tickled had they been anywhere else, but they only made her wetter now. Her legs ached with the strain of holding herself apart like this – she didn’t mind, not with his hands, large and strong, resting against the sensitive skin on the inside of each thigh.   
  
“ _Darlin’._ ” He might have said it or just whispered it against her slickness, but when she came, a shriek and a whimper wrestling in her throat with a growl, it was to that endearment – the word that spoke of a place she’d never been. His home.   
  
Spoken to her, murmured again in a cloud of pleasure, it spoke of hers, too.   
  


~

  
  
Nyota seriously didn’t see why they had to use a video feed from the bridge _just_ to present a commendation, but that was Kirk’s prerogative. He seemed pretty happy about making a speech, anyway; it was probably the only opportunity she’d ever have to listen to one that was both pompous and unprofessional. “Okay!” He grinned into the console. “You’ve probably all heard that Lieutenant _Nyota_ Uhura saved Lieutenant Sulu’s a… _life_ on the last away mission, and performed some awesome translations, too.” She rolled her eyes. _Awesome translations_ , indeed. Leave it to him to trivialize what she did.   
  
Kirk paused, probably for dramatic effect, before he went on. “Anyway, I notified the admiralty, and they were extremely impressed, so Uhura now has a commendation for performing well under stress, and for putting another crewmember’s life before her own. Congratulations, Lieutenant.” He grinned, holding out his hand to her. “Come on over here.”   
  
_Drama queen_ , Nyota thought, not without affection, and went over to be honored. He grabbed her hand and shook it hard, grinning at the console like some old-time president touching a celebrity. “I expect everyone to perform as well as she did, except you guys shouldn’t get a rock thrown at your heads. Captain Kirk, out.” He pushed a button, shutting off the feed.   
  
Cheers filled the bridge as everyone except Spock (she knew that without looking; his hands were too sensitive to knock together like that, and it was an illogical human custom anyhow) started applauding. “ _Yo maiyo!_ ” Chekov shouted, and Sulu winked at her before putting two fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistling.   
  
“Good job, Uhura.” Kirk clapped her on the back. “And congratulations,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice as the others went back to their work, “about that other thing.”   
  
“What other thing?”   
  
“You and _Bones_.” He smirked, his arms folded across his chest, apparently unaware of the entrance to the bridge sliding open. “He wasn’t a grouchy-ass at breakfast today, so I figured that you guys…”   
  
“That we _what?_ ” Nyota asked acidically. It was one thing for him to suspect things, but for him to call her out on it on the bridge wasn’t exactly captainly behavior. It _was_ Kirk behavior, but he’d probably regret putting his foot in his mouth in three seconds or so.   
  
“Yeah, Jim. What’d we do?”   
  
“Oh, _shit_.” The shit-eating grin turned into the please-don’t-hypo-me grin as Kirk slowly swiveled to look at McCoy. Two and a half seconds; not too shabby. His usual regret turnaround was more like four. “Hi, Bones.”   
  
“You been gossipin’ about my private life again, Jim?” McCoy asked rhetorically. Kirk’s eyes darted to his empty hands and then back to his face, probably checking for hyposprays. “What’d I say about that?”   
  
“Come _on_ , Bones!” Kirk put his hands on his hips (“man-stance. _Man-stance!_ ”). “You and Nyota, _you_ know...” he made a semi-crude gesture with one hand “…and you’re keeping your mouth shut about it?”   
  
McCoy blinked, his mouth opening slightly. “Jim.”   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“The kid is listenin’, Jim.” Chekov was, in fact, shaking with giggles at the navigation station, a hand over his mouth. Sulu’s ears were red, and Spock’s were green. Even from here, Nyota could see the color change at the science station.   
  
She was going to kill him, captain or no captain.   
  
“It’s okay, Bones.” Kirk shrugged. “He probably knows all about the birds and the bees, anyway. He’s eighteen, right? I was _so_ horny when I was eighteen.”   
  
McCoy sighed, the same one he’d used when Kirk had fallen over his own feet in sickbay. The one that said _I’ll get you for this, no matter how innocent my expression._ “You’re overdue for the Risan flu vaccine.” _Called it_ , Nyota thought with a smile. She’d apparently learned to read some of his facial expressions, too – not that she didn’t like the prospect of learning the rest. “And you _do_ remember you’re flirtin’ with the hobgoblin now, right?”   
  
Kirk squeaked and clapped his hands against his neck. “Dammit, Bones! That one _hurts!_ ” No comment on the ‘hobgoblin’ remark; it seemed that hypos trumped relationship-related insults.   
  
“Suck it up.” McCoy quirked an eyebrow at him, then looked at Nyota. “I’ll see you later, darlin’?”   
  
“Yeah.” Intimate as that endearment was, hearing it on the bridge definitely didn’t piss her off. It was quiet, a promise rather than a claim. “I’ll see you later, Leonard.”   
  
“Good.” He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it lightly, before turning on his heel to leave. Watching him was reminiscent of that same time, she realized, a few months ago, when she’d been afraid to admire him. Now, she _could_.   
  
Tonight, she would sing for him.   
  
There was a message for her when she got back to her console, ready to get back to her Skorr vocabulary (it was always best to know one’s enemy, after all; or one’s ally’s enemy, in this case).   
  
**To:** n.uhura@ncc-1701.fed  
 **From:** p.chekov@ncc-1701.fed  
  
 _Relationships were invented in Russia._   
  
Nyota sent back a reply ( _It wouldn’t surprise me at all_ ), then opened up a new message window. The Skorr could wait a few minutes for her to send a thankful message to her new lover – it felt good, thinking of him that way, _lover_ \- for what was undoubtedly the first of many retorts to Kirk’s comments regarding what they had.   
  
For some reason, she found herself smiling, not minding a bit. Kirk was just one distraction. There were more hours of after-shift than shift, five years at least to explore new worlds, new people, and new meanings for a simple touch of the hand.   
  
She looked forward to finding them all.


End file.
